Ryan Daum — Systems Engineering Consultant

What I Do

Rust & C++ Systems Work

I help teams adopt Rust or improve the C++ they already have. Production experience across medical devices, autonomous vehicles, distributed runtimes, and database engines. I can get your team productive or unblock what they've already started.

Engineering Practices

I've helped clients establish coding standards, code review culture, CI pipelines, tooling, and telemetry — the fundamentals that make a team ship well. Two decades across startups and Google taught me what actually works.

Performance

Profiling, benchmarking, and fixing the slow path. At Google I optimized video pipelines for Stadia and worked on Ad Exchange infrastructure handling millions of requests per second. I make systems fast and prove it with numbers.

About

I've been writing programs since they wheeled an Apple II into my classroom in grade 1 — self-taught from the start.

Grade 3 report card: 'Ryan's work is very untidy. More work is needed in cursive writing. His journal entries are computer programs.' — "His journal entries are computer programs." — Grade 3 report card

My career started in backend development — ad exchanges, analytics platforms, partner integrations — and over 25 years has wound its way into systems programming, embedded Linux, database internals, autonomous vehicles, and medical devices.

At Google (2011–2021), I spent a decade shipping C++ and embedded Linux across Ad Exchange, Nest/Home Hub, Stadia/Chromecast, and Fiber/WiFi. Since leaving, most of my work has been in Rust: storage engines, control systems, and moor, a distributed programmable runtime with a from-scratch compiler, VM, and transactional storage engine.

I like building things — it's what I've always done and what I'm happiest doing. I'm always interested in tough problems and good teams. For larger engagements, I can bring in experienced engineers I've worked with over the years.

I'm based in Hamilton, Ontario. When I'm not writing code, I'm farming, making wine, or skiing.

Recent Work

Consulting

Eden — Rust Technical Lead

Engineering fundamentals for a growing team: coding and review standards, migrating from GitHub to GitLab, setting up CI, establishing performance profiling and benchmarking, reworking telemetry infrastructure.

Open Source

mooR — Distributed Runtime in Rust

A complete programmable runtime built from scratch: compiler, virtual machine, transactional storage engine, task scheduler, and networked clustering. Approaching 1.0.

I build the systems under your systems.