MEET OUR TEAM

We're a team of intellectually curious and deeply technical infrastructure builders on a mission to scale IBC.

Bo Du - Technical Lead

Bo Du

Technical Staff

Bo was the first hire at Chronosphere (unicorn) and infrastructure engineer at Uber and Capsule8 (acquired). His focus is on database, distributed systems and software infrastructure with experience developing M3DB (OSS time series database).

Peter Kim

Peter Kim

operational staff

Peter consulted for Ernst & Young’s Strategy and Innovation divisions. His focus has been on GtM strategy, new product launch/scale, organizational restructuring, and synergy capture with experience connecting partnerships and joint-builds in DeFi.

Wenwei Xiong

Technical Staff

Wenwei delivered database platforms at Paradigm 4 to leading pharmaceutical companies identifying biomarkers for diseases including COVID-19. At Avitide (acquired by Repligen), Wenwei led a team creating biologics databases. Wenwei's academic research and software tools have been cited 800+ times and helped secure $3.7M+ funding from NSF.

Giuseppe Valente

Technical Staff

Giuseppe was an early engineer at Arista Networks and helped the company grow from $100M to $40B in market cap. He previously spent time at Elastic, Cisco Systems, EURid (.eu domain registry) and the Italian National Research Council. His focus is on distributed systems, networking and infrastructure.

Sai Deng

Technical Staff

Sai was a senior software engineer at Google and worked there for 6 years. He built various R&D projects at Google, including VP9/AV1 open source video codec development, perceptual quality improvements, and a Virtual Reality project that involved light fields encoding and rendering.

Derek Shiell

Technical Staff

Derek was a distinguished engineer at EdgeCast CDN where he spent the last 11+ years building and scaling the caching and compute platforms. During his time there, he helped it grow into a global platform delivering terabits per second of data and billions of client requests per day across hundreds of data centers. Prior to EdgeCast, Derek worked for Epson Research and Development implementing face and object recognition, detection, and alignment algorithms.

Nicolas Pernas

Technical Staff

Nico was a Staff Engineer at Twilio where he helped build their WebRTC based real-time video product. He has also been at AWS, where he spent time working on the virtualisation stack that is the foundation of EC2. He started as an embedded engineer doing low level type of work: Linux kernel development, boot-loaders, high performance networking and IoT.

Lizhang Qin

Technical Staff

Lizhang was a technical lead at Uber on the Freight backend platform. At Uber, he worked on redesigning the backend with micro-services, an event-driven message bus, and related frontend work. Before that, he worked at Citadel Securities, built High-Frequency trading systems, and competed with other firms with low latency strategies. He also worked at Motorola and Morningstar.

Ethan Oak

Operational Staff

Ethan started his career in management consulting at McKinsey and was an early member of their Digital Asset practice. He developed McKinsey’s POV on the relevance of DeFi for institutions and the disruptive potential of digital assets in the gaming and metaverse space. He went on to lead strategy and operations at Space Runners, a fashion metaverse startup. Ethan has also spent 10 serving in the US Army National Guard as an Intelligence Analyst. He graduated with a BS in Business Analytics from MIT.

Eddie Pak

Operational Staff

Before Polymer, Eddie was a Talent Acquisition leader at Polygon Labs, where he scaled the company from 350 to 550, working directly with the Founding Office and senior executives. Prior to web3, Eddie spent a majority of his career at Google, Meta, and Netflix. He has experience in all facets of HR including recruiting, talent mapping, sourcing, negotiating, and stakeholder management. His focus is on finding the best talent (200+ placed so far) and building world class organizations.

George Verbitsky

Technical Staff

George is a software engineer with experience in various areas of software development. Most recently, he worked for percipient.ai where he designed and developed different modules for a web applicationthat detects people and objects in video content and builds analytics based on the collected data.In the past, he has implemented indexing functionality for distributed NoSQL databases,developed various parts of Flash Translation Layer responsible for managing access to Flash Memoryin Flash Memory Arrays, and even designed a C-like languagefor a proprietary Network Processor architecture and wrote a compiler for it.

Alexander Eliseev

Technical Staff

Alex was a software engineer at Amazon for 5 years where he mostly worked on various Kindle initiatives, including Wordwise and a knowledge graph for books serving more than 2 million users. The following 4 years he spent in the startup world building ML and blockchain powered products. His focus is on distributed systems, infrastructure and AI.

Thomas Dekeyser

Technical Staff

Prior to joining Polymer, Thomas was a Developer Relations at Interchain GmbH working on IBC, combining his passion for learning/teaching with empowering communities through web3 technology. Thomas spent his twenties doing a lot of learning, both formal (Master in Photonics Engineering, Master in Blockchain Technologies) and informal (how organisations work, self-taught web development, psychology). Ultimately this journey led him towards blockchain technology and a move from his native Belgium to Berlin. In the future, he envisions interchain development powered by IBC to be as pervasive as web2 technology is today.

Gabriel Perez Carafa

OPerational Staff

Gabriel is an rising senior studying economics and computer programming at the University of Southern California. Prior to joining Polymer, he worked as a technical research writer for Alchemy where he covered ZK-infrastructure topics . He currently serves as President of Blockchain@USC. He envisions blockchain interoperability enabling a new global financial system of the future where entities on opposite ends of the world can transact seamlessly and instantaneously.

OUR ADVISORS

We've brought together strategic partners and experts to help us execute on our multi-chain vision.

Jack Zampolin

co-founder and Technical Lead at Strangelove

Jack Zampolin is a co-founder and Technical Lead at Strangelove. Jack came to into the crypto world via Blockstack and then moved to Tendermint as Director of Product. He is currently Co-Founder (Product) at Sommelier Network. As a proof-of-stake pioneer and dev evangelist, Jack brings a special blend of cloud infrastructure and blockchain experience.

Mustafa Al-Bassam

co-founder of Celestia

Mustafa is a co-founder of Celestia, the first modular blockchain network. He completed a PhD in Computer Science at UCL, where he published various research papers on blockchain layer 1 scalability. Previously, he was the co-founder of blockchain scalability startup Chainspace (acquired by Facebook).

CAREERS

Interested in a career with us at Polymer?

We’re always looking for talented individuals interested in working on problems in web3 interoperability infrastructure. Click the link below to get in touch.

Get in touch