Kashav Madan

I am a software developer based in Toronto. I enjoy solving complex programming problems. I like rap music, fitness, and sports. I have passion for knowledge and the mind, and like to be excellent and thorough. I have been programming since 2011.

I graduated in 2019 with a Honours Bachelor of Science in Computer Science and Mathematics from the University of Toronto in Toronto. I enjoyed school and took hard courses.

After graduating I joined Mozilla and worked on DOM platform code for the Firefox browser and Gecko rendering engine. My team was responsible for implementing site per process isolation in the browser to mitigate the effects of the Spectre CPU vulnerability. This work required refactoring much of the Firefox codebase and spanned teams across most of the organization. I led large projects early on and became owner of the session restore component of the browser. I left Mozilla in 2021 shortly after switching to the SpiderMonkey compiler team.

At the start of 2022 I joined Cohere to work on ML infrastructure for serving LLMs. I didn't stay at Cohere long because I was dealing with burnout and the barrier of entry into NLP was higher than expected at the time.

After that I was interested in learning Clojure so I joined CircleCI as a Senior Security Engineer. I focused on threat detection and specifically stopping cryptominers from abusing the free tier of the platform.

In 2023 I moved to San Francisco and joined Airtable as a Product Engineer. I worked on implementing full-text search into the backend with Rust. I got to work with TypeScript in production which was an enjoyable experience.

Before university I attempted to start a company with high school friends focused on hosting local social networks at events. We iterated on the idea for some years and shipped a few web and mobile apps in that time. It was called Chapsule because the initial idea was to build virtual time capsules for capturing memories and photos to look back on later.

My open source work is at github.com/kashav (and previously github.com/kshvmdn). I wrote a series of blog posts about esoteric programming bugs at nestedparens.com. There is a list of my work at this link.