Roman Volosatovs

GitHub: @rvolosatovs • LinkedIn: @rvolosatovs

Professional Experience

2023-2025

Cosmonic: Principal Software Engineer

Tech: Rust, Go, C, Nix, WebAssembly, Elixir, GitHub, NATS.io, TCP/IP, UDP, HTTP, Kubernetes, gRPC, QUIC, OpenAPI, AWS

At Cosmonic I am the WebAssembly runtime expert and perform most of my work as part of the Bytecode Alliance.

Primarily, I build and maintain open-source tooling and low-level libraries around WebAssembly in Rust. For example, I have designed and implemented:

• transport-agnostic general-purpose RPC framework based on WIT - bytecodealliance/wrpc. For more information, see a talk I gave with a colleague at WasmCon 2024
• Wasm canonical ABI for native code - wasmcloud/cabish, streamlining native code integration with WebAssembly
• Wasm component testing and plugin framework - wasmcloud/wadge
• WIT package manager - bytecodealliance/wit-deps, developed to fulfill a temporary feature gap in existing Wasm tooling, adopted by various members of Bytecode Alliance
• high-performance, multi-tenant, embeddable WebAssembly runtime for cloud-native applications - rvolosatovs/wasmlet,

These projects are used by various companies and individuals and serve as the basis on which the core product of Cosmonic is built - wasmcloud/wasmcloud, a distributed WebAssembly execution platform.

I am heavily involved in development of bytecodealliance/wasmtime - the leading WebAssembly runtime, which I am a maitainer of. For example, I was involved in design and development of wasip2 and wasip3.

Additionally, I train junior developers and lead a small team helping other businesses benefit from latest WebAssembly features and optimize their WebAssembly runtimes.

As part of working at Cosmonic, I also completed a contract work for NEAR blockchain, helping them adopt Wasmtime, introducing component model, optimizing their gas instrumentation and overall performance.

Additionally, I actively represent the company at various w3c WebAssembly and WASI working group meetings, WASI, component model and Wasmtime development meetings as well as conferences, such as KubeCon, WasmCon and Wasm I/O.

2021-2023

Profian: Principal Software Engineer / Network Service Tech Lead

Tech: Rust, C, Nix/NixOS, WebAssembly, TLS, TCP/IP, HTTP, cryptography, AWS, Equinix, OCI(docker, podman), GitHub, GitLab, Linux, systemd, Trusted Execution Environments(Intel SGX, AMD SEV-SNP), Nginx, OpenID Connect, REST, OpenAPI

At Profian I worked on Enarx - open-source confidential computing platform for secure execution of WebAssembly workloads in trusted execution environments and services around it.

The company was closed due to lack of funding.

• Contributed significantly to design of the overall system
• Lead a team in development of network services on a tight schedule in accordance to business objectives
• Helped team members to overcome obstacles, blockers and meet deadlines
• Mentored the team in Rust, Nix, networking and system design
• Mentored students as part of internship programs
• Represented the company at KubeCon 2022, Open Source Summit Europe 2022, FOSDEM 2023
• Represented the company at WASI SIG Registries working group meetings
• Designed and implemented:
  • Sallyport - secure and performant library for proxying syscalls
  • Networking and virtual filesystem support for Enarx execution layer
  • Drawbridge - a Merkle tree-based object registry
  • Tooling to increase developer productivity:
    • Minimal WASI shell to facilitate development and testing of virtual file systems
    • GitHub worklow job name generator
• Set up, maintained and continuosly improved organization-wide CI processes and release pipelines
  • Designed and implemented a Nix-based build library for maintenance and CI performance
  • Provided Enarx image media (AMIs, ISOs, etc.)
• Brought up all initial server infrastructure using NixOS on AWS and Equinix
• Contributed to various open-source projects, most notably:
  • rust-lang/cargo
  • bytecodealliance/wasmtime

2021

Docker Inc: Senior Software Engineer (Programmable OS team)

Tech: Go, Swift, C#, OCI(docker), Linux, Windows, MacOS, GitHub, Jira, REST, OpenAPI

At Docker I worked on open-source Docker Engine and proprietary Docker Desktop application for Windows and Mac with focus on performance optimizations.

• Designed and implemented Linux cgroup-based start/stop feature released in Docker Desktop shortly after I had already left the company
• Contributed to moby/moby

2016-2021

The Things Industries / The Things Network: Backend Engineer

Tech: Go, Lua, C, Python, JavaScript, gRPC, protocol buffers, TLS, TCP/IP, UDP, DNS, Linux, cryptography, OCI(docker), InfluxDB, Redis 6, LoRaWAN, AWS, Azure, GitHub, GitLab, Travis CI, Nginx, IoT, edge devices, REST

At The Things Industries / The Things Network I worked on open-source and proprietary parts of a distributed, global LoRaWAN IoT network operator stack.

• Was involved directly in technical conversations with customers
• Provided technical support to high-profile customers
• Managed and represented the company at The Things Conference organized yearly
• Designed the LoRaWAN specification as part of LoRa Alliance Technical Commitee
• Provided AWS-based SaaS offerings
• Implemented support for device roaming in collaboration with other LoRaWAN network operators
• Designed and implemented:
  • LoRaWAN specification-compliant, highly-available, distributed, performant microservice components for multi-tenant environments:
    • Network Server - performing routing and MAC layer communication
    • Join Server - performing device provisioning, secure cryptographic key derivation, exchange and storage on HSM
  • NOC - a proprietary component monitoring the state of the network handling serveral thousand requests per second
  • Build tooling:
    • Generic all-inclusive protoc OCI image, which I eventually have inherited
  • Tooling to increase developer productivity:
    • protoc plugin with fieldmask support
    • Binary LoRaWAN frame decoder

2016

Eindhoven University of Technology: Software Engineer

Tech: Go, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, InfluxDB, OCI(docker), systemd, REST

• Designed, implemented and maintained a full-stack research application interfacing with Philips Hue lights used on-site in a hospital

2016

Google Summer of Code: Intern

Tech: Go, C, TypeScript, systemd

• Designed and implemented systemgo - init system in Go compatible with systemd unit file format for a browser-based operating system

Hobby Experience

• Nix and NixOS - I use Nix and NixOS on my personal machines/servers since 2016
  • Member of NixOS organization on Github
  • Contribute to NixOS/nixpkgs
  • FOSDEM 2023 talk about adopting Nix at Profian
• rund - A gRPC service in Go, which runs arbitrary Linux processes in a separate cgroup2 in an Alpine Linux container via pivot_root with mTLS authentication
• Offline speech-to-text tool using Deepspeech
• Rust bindings to a C VAD library
• Idiomatic Rust wrapper for the above
• Rust bindings to WebExtensions JS API via WASM
• Idiomatic Rust wrapper for the above
• Julia - I use Julia for computations and occasional scripting, data analysis
• I use Linux and BSD derivatives on my machines exclusively since 2012

Education

2015-2018

BSc, Software Science; Eindhoven University of Technology

• mooshy - alongside my peers, developed a tool, which allows arbitrary code execution with escalated privileges utilizing ShellShock and Dirty CoW Linux kernel exploit
• Taken Declarative Programming course in university, which was completely based on Haskell with a big focus on category theory
  • Wrote a Lisp interpreter in Haskell with a study partner as part of the course

About me

• Languages:
  • Russian - bilingual
  • Latvian - bilingual
  • English - proficient
  • French - basic knowledge
  • Dutch - basic knowledge
• Studied in a Jazz college part-time in parallel to high school studies
• Worked as a professional guitarist, guitar teacher and math teacher in the past
• I like various types of art, board games, powerlifting, hiking, snowboarding and nature