About

Amsterdam, NL

Engineer based in Amsterdam, working on the kind of low-level systems code that’s hard to make fast and hard to make small. Most of my time goes into zero-knowledge cryptography on embedded targets. The part of the proving stack that’s typically considered impossible until someone does it anyway.

I came to this from the performance-engineering side: chasing microseconds in driver loops, rearranging memory layouts so they hit the cache the way you’d want, learning the M-profile ISA well enough that the disassembly stops surprising you. That ends up being a useful skillset when you’re trying to do BN254 pairings on a $7 part.

What I work on

Zero-knowledge cryptography — Groth16/BN254 verification, STARKs, pairing math, Poseidon, Semaphore-adjacent tooling.
Embedded Rust — no_std, Cortex-M33 and RISC-V (Hazard3), realtime constraints, hand-tuned crypto kernels.
Performance work — driver loops, hot paths, memory layout, profiling and disassembly across Rust, Go, Python, and Solidity.

How I got here

I’m a self-taught programmer with a track record of learning things the hard way. My entry into the world of systems began when I followed a primal instinct to install Linux on my mother’s company laptop—accidentally wiping the entire financial database in the process. Instead of banning me from tech, my parents got me my own machine, and I haven’t stopped digging into internals since.

I started where many do—Bash scripts and Minecraft mods—but I stayed for the complexity. I was the student who brought a laptop to school not to take notes, but to work on my own kernels and tools. Formal education was never the primary driver; curiosity was.

In 2026 I started contributing upstream to Plonky3 and joined as a maintainer in May, working on Goldilocks Poseidon2 performance across aarch64 NEON and Zen 5 AVX-2/-512.

Recent shipped work is in Plonky3 performance contributions and zkmcu; methodology write-ups in writing.

Available for zk perf engineering contracts and senior IC roles. Download CV (PDF) or reach me at info@axobello.com.