Sami Tolvanen
Staff Software Engineer TLM at Google
Mountain View, California, United States
Summary
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Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolSami Tolvanen is a Staff Software Engineer based in Mountain View with 11 years of experience hardening Linux and Android at scale, currently leading Android Platform Security and compiler- and architecture-level mitigations at Google. He has a strong track record shipping platform security features—starting with Android verified boot in Nougat and kernel hardening in Oreo—and now drives Clang/LLVM mitigations and RISC-V support. Sami combines deep kernel and firmware expertise from roles at Nokia and as a co-founder/CTO building a reputation system serving billions of monthly requests, bringing both product-level scalability and low-level systems rigor. His open-source kernel work shows a practical focus on performance and security, from fixing recursive spinlocks to enabling vmapped shadow stacks by default.
11 years of coding experience
13 years of employment as a software developer
M.Sc., Computer Science, M.Sc., Computer Science at Tampere University of Technology 1965-2018
English, Finnish, Swedish, German
Stackoverflow
1reputation
0reached
0answers
0questions
Github Skills (19)
system-programming10
dwarf10
kernel-module10
c1110
linux-kernel10
c1710
sys10
android10
hash-functions10
operating-system10
bootloader9
error-correction9
embedded8
data-structures8
data-structure8
Programming languages (10)
Github contributions (5)
sonyxperiadev/kernel
Feb 2015 - Oct 2020
Role in this project:
Embedded Systems Engineer / Kernel Developer
Embedded Systems Engineer / Kernel DeveloperContributions:45 commits in 5 years 8 months
Contributions summary:Sami primarily contributed to the Android kernel, focusing on bug fixes, and performance improvements. Their work involved resolving function type mismatches in `lib/list_sort.c`, fixing a recursive spinlock issue in `kernel/scs.c`, ensuring correct alignment for `__cfi_check` in module builds, merging sections with LTO, and addressing issues related to `compoundliteral` merging. Additionally, they added generic definitions for `__va_function` and `__pa_function` within the memory management context, and enabled vmapped shadow stacks by default, indicating a focus on performance and security.
Vishalcj17/kernel-x86-WSL
Jan 2020 - Aug 2021
Contributions:14 commits in 1 year 7 months
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