kckyeung
Staff Rust Engineer
I designed the message format architecture for XCM, the cross-chain interoperability protocol used across the Polkadot ecosystem, while leading the XCM team at Parity Technologies from 2021 to 2024. Today I'm a senior Rust engineer with 10+ years of experience building protocol-level infrastructure across blockchain, browser engines, and compilers.
My work spans three communities. In blockchain, I've shipped XCM and Substrate framework primitives (including StorageNMap and ResultQuery) at Parity, contributed to AggLayer cross-chain ZK aggregation at Polygon Labs, and consulted with web3 teams on protocol design. In web standards, I spent three and a half years as a Mozilla Research volunteer contributing to the Servo browser engine and the WHATWG Fetch and HTML specifications. In Rust itself, I contributed to the compiler as part of the NLL (Non-Lexical Lifetimes) working group, including work on the MIR borrow checker.
I've taught XCM as an invited instructor across three Polkadot Blockchain Academy cohorts (Cambridge, Buenos Aires, and Hong Kong), spoken at Polkadot Decoded 2023, and shepherded community RFCs for the XCM format.
My work spans three communities. In blockchain, I've shipped XCM and Substrate framework primitives (including StorageNMap and ResultQuery) at Parity, contributed to AggLayer cross-chain ZK aggregation at Polygon Labs, and consulted with web3 teams on protocol design. In web standards, I spent three and a half years as a Mozilla Research volunteer contributing to the Servo browser engine and the WHATWG Fetch and HTML specifications. In Rust itself, I contributed to the compiler as part of the NLL (Non-Lexical Lifetimes) working group, including work on the MIR borrow checker.
I've taught XCM as an invited instructor across three Polkadot Blockchain Academy cohorts (Cambridge, Buenos Aires, and Hong Kong), spoken at Polkadot Decoded 2023, and shepherded community RFCs for the XCM format.
Experience: 11 years
Yearly salary: $184,000
Hourly rate: $0
Nationality: ðŸ‡ðŸ‡° Hong Kong
Residency: ðŸ‡ðŸ‡° Hong Kong
Experience
Senior Software Engineer
POLYGON LABS 2025 - 2026
Refactored shared functions and data structures into primitive Rust crates across the AggLayer codebase, improving interoperability and eliminating duplication between internal libraries. Accelerated AggLayer Merkle tree processing by pre-hashing empty trees at compile time, reducing runtime overhead in cross-chain ZK proof aggregation.
Team Lead, XCM (Cross-Consensus Messaging)
PARITY TECHNOLOGIES 2021 - 2024
Led the XCM team and designed the message format for XCM, Polkadot's cross-chain interoperability protocol. Established and led the XCM RFC process, shepherding community proposals to grow external contributor participation in protocol evolution. Authored core Substrate framework primitives and invited XCM instructor at the Polkadot Blockchain Academy.
Software Engineer II
SHAPE SECURITY INC. 2018 - 2020
Rewrote a proprietary domain-specific language compiler in Rust, achieving a 5x runtime speedup. Optimized user agent string parsing performance and extended the language's type system to support non-nullable types.
Volunteer Contributor & Code Reviewer
MOZILLA RESEARCH 2015 - 2018
Member of the Rust NLL working group; recognized as a 'Friend of the Forest' for Rust community work in China.
Skills
blockchain-engineer
typescript
rust
english
chinese-mandarin
french
japanese