Cristian Pop
Principal Software Engineer at Starcloud (YC S24)
Redmond, Washington, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolCristian Pop is a Principal Software Engineer with 11+ years building secure, high-scale systems across cloud, IoT, and embedded domains, most recently joining Starcloud to work on megawatt-scale data centers in space. Previously he led silicon and cloud hardware engineering efforts at Microsoft, authoring critical device provisioning and security features in the widely used Azure IoT C# and C SDKs. His deep embedded-systems expertise includes certificate management, OpenSSL integration, and low-level firmware—work that powered projects from Windows networking stacks to HuskySat-1 satellite subsystems. He combines hands-on C/C# development with security-first thinking, having fixed subtle buffer and hostname validation issues and addressed Y2K38 concerns in token generation. An instructor and advisor at the University of Washington, he blends academic mentorship with production-grade engineering. Colleagues know him for tackling thorny interoperability and cryptography problems that sit at the intersection of cloud services and constrained devices.
11 years of coding experience
18 years of employment as a software developer
Masters, Computer Science, Masters, Computer Science at University of WashingtonPOLITEHNICA București National University for Science and Technology
Romanian, English, French
Github Skills (20)
android-sdk10
c1110
azure-iothub10
security10
c1710
c9910
iot10
sdk10
openssl10
dotnet-core10
embedded10
csharp10
wolfssl10
networking9
netframework9
Programming languages (16)
Github contributions (5)
Azure/azure-iot-sdk-csharp
Sep 2017 - Oct 2019
A C# SDK for connecting devices to Microsoft Azure IoT services
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:10 releases, 5 reviews, 144 commits in 2 years
Contributions summary:Cristian's commits primarily involve developing the device provisioning service, focusing on implementing device provisioning service for the Azure IoT platform. The user worked on adding and modifying the C# SDK for connecting devices to Microsoft Azure IoT services. Their work included implementing core classes for device provisioning, such as `ProvisioningDeviceClient`, `ProvisioningRegistrationResult`, and related functionalities.
csharpiotmicrosoft-azure
Azure/azure-iot-sdk-c
Jan 2018 - Sep 2022
A C99 SDK for connecting devices to Microsoft Azure IoT services
Role in this project:Embedded Systems Engineer / IoT Developer
Embedded Systems Engineer / IoT DeveloperContributions:7 releases, 114 reviews, 39 commits in 4 years 8 months
Contributions summary:Cristian primarily contributes to the Azure IoT SDK for C, focusing on certificate management, provisioning client enhancements, and OpenSSL engine support. Their work includes fixing certificate generation issues, refactoring and improving the provisioning client, and implementing OpenSSL engine integration. This involves modifying C code, updating submodules, and integrating with external libraries like OpenSSL, indicating a deep understanding of embedded systems, security, and networking within the IoT context.
c99iotmicrosoft-azureazureiothub
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