Matt Bryant

About Me

I currently live in San Francisco and am taking a break from work. During my free time I enjoy climbing, long-distance running, photography, cooking, working on random projects, and playing DotA. I like writing code and solving tricky problems, especially related to optimization or security. I run OpenSUSE on my computers (though I've been playing with Nix recently), and am a believer in the FOSS movement.

I occasionally write about things elsewhere on my site.

I can be reached by email at mbryantprogramsareproofs.com (public key), and you may be interested in my official resume.

Current Projects

I recently built FunctionTrace, a better Python profiler. It's a non-sampled profiler with an intuitive graphical interface that is able to profile multiprocess and multithreaded applications, all while having an order-of-magnitude lower overhead than other Python profilers.

Languages

I am most excited by Rust, which I think has the potential to be the systems language of the future. Until then, I tend to use C and Python, both of which I have had worked with professionally for over a decade.

I have also worked for hundreds to thousands of hours with each of x86 Assembly, Terraform, JavaScript, Go, Bash, C++, OCaml, Java, Standard ML, and PHP, and have some experience with Go, Haskell, ARM/PPC Assembly, and various DBMS.

Experience

Infrastructure Security Tech/Program Lead at Asana from January 2019 to May 2025
I founded the Infrastructure Security team and served as its tech lead, preventing malicious actors from gaining access to customer data. My team ensured Asana shipped simpler and more robust infrastructure and guided other teams to analyze and prioritize security for new features.
In an individual contributer capacity, I developed core infrastructure and led company-wide security culture and architecture:

• I was responsible for the security architecture of Asana's wholesale infrastructure migration to Kubernetes, a multi-year project staffed by the entire Infrastructure department. Working with teams across the globe, I designed and implemented security controls to make it easier for engineers to build and maintain services while increasing their security.
• I implemented a custom network egress filter for all production traffic (>100GB/min), significantly raising the bar for attackers to exfiltrate data from and move laterally within Asana's infrastructure.
• I worked with dozens of teams across the org to enforce mandatory code review for the entire company, demonstrating the policy's value and implementing it without negatively impacting developer velocity.
• I introduced a programmatic data classification system for Asana's core data model, allowing developers to confidently work with data without risk of unintentionally exposing user content.
• I wrote and merged >3000 pull requests, and reviewed >5000 more, consistently ranking as one of the top-5 most prolific engineers at Asana.
• I saved thousands of developer hours and millions of dollars of AWS spend yearly by finding and reducing various inefficiencies in systems including data science, developer experience, and core infrastructure.

Software Development Engineer at Green Hills Software from July 2016 to January 2019
I worked on safety and performance critical code used in embedded systems around the world, including rockets, planes, and millions of cars, and was the lead developer on a major project to build secure computers for remote work.
Among other things, I built a mutex that doesn't suffer from contention, developed a secure GPU virtualization approach, and designed more secure systems using virtualization and isolation.

B.S. in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University in 2016
I studied Computer Science and minored in Mathematics at CMU.

Teaching Assistant at Carnegie Mellon from August 2013 to May 2016
I was a teaching assistant for five courses over six semesters at Carnegie Mellon: 15-410 (Operating System Design and Implementation), 15-411 (Compiler Design), 15-210 (Parallel and Sequential Data Structures and Algorithms), 15-213 (Introduction to Computer Systems), and 15-122 (Principles of Imperative Programming). I interacted with hundreds of students while designing homeworks and projects, holding office hours, teaching recitations, and grading assignments.

Security Research Internship at BAE Systems Applied Intelligence from June 2015 to August 2015
I did research on efficient and non-invasive taint analysis for common off-the-shelf programs, including developing a programmatic debugger for x86_64. Additionally, I developed several scalable lock-free data structures, and contributed to a lock-free Python interpreter.

Security Internship at SilverSky from June 2014 to August 2014
I worked on a project to defend Microsoft Word against file-based exploits through server-side monitoring. My research culminated with the creation of a novel framework that was able to successfully detect and prevent numerous zero-day exploits against common programs, including Internet Explorer, Microsoft Word, and Adobe Reader.

Software Engineer Internship at SilverSky from June 2013 to August 2013
I developed a custom functional/regression testing tool for one of SilverSky's flagship email management products, allowing them to move faster and ensure product stability.

Software Engineer Internship at Perimeter E-Security from June 2011 to August 2012
I developed the mobile version of Perimeter’s flagship email client from scratch, supporting hundreds of enterprise customers. Additionally, I made various changes to the mail server and client, including adding support for POP3 over SSL and improving calendar usability.

Eagle Scout as of June 2011
For my Eagle Scout project, I planned and managed the renovation of the cross-country running trails behind Monmouth Academy. With the help of dozens of volunteers, I turned more than half a mile of perpetual swamp into well-drained running trails where races are still held.