Systems Engineer — Rust · Protocol Engineering · Cryptography · AI Agent Infrastructure . devrel . Hard technical problems
I'm a solo systems engineer and independent developer based in Lagos, Nigeria, with 8+ years building in Rust and C++. I work across distributed systems, protocol engineering, cryptography, and developer tooling — mostly shipping things I wish existed while I was building something else.
Education: B.Tech in Mechatronics, Robotics & Automation Engineering, plus a degree in Computational/Applied Mathematics. Currently applying for a Master's degree in Germany, focused on robotics and embedded systems.
Multiple international hackathon wins.
Alongside building, I spend time explaining and teaching what I build:
- Lead DevRel, ICP Hub Sahara West Africa — community-facing technical education across the West Africa ICP ecosystem
- DevRel, Microsandbox — created "Changelog Friday," a recurring visual series on X tracking weekly PR velocity and shipped work
- Technical writing at mahmudsudo.hashnode.dev doubles as teaching material for the projects below
Deep in open cryptanalysis problems at the intersection of Ethereum protocol research and applied math:
- Poseidon Cryptanalysis Initiative (Ethereum Foundation) — working across all three open tracks: the Attack Reward Program 2026, the Poseidon1 Collision Prize, and the Density problem
- Proximity Prize (proximityprize.org, $1M EF challenge) — self-studying toward Reed–Solomon list decoding and correlated agreement open problems, building up from an engineering/applied-math foundation through abstract algebra and coding theory
- Following and engaging with Lean Ethereum research and talks — the protocol-simplification effort spanning consensus, cryptography, and zk tooling
- Writing up findings and study notes as I go — see Writing & Research Notes below
Building the trust and reliability layer for AI agents operating in high-stakes environments:
| Project | Description |
|---|---|
| AI Agent Trust Infrastructure | B2B SaaS trust/accountability layer for fintechs deploying AI agents. Combines four pieces: a DNS-AID-based resolver for agent identity discovery, an Agent CA issuing PKI-style certificates, RiskGate policy gating, and sandboxed execution with full audit trails. Regulatory pressure on fintechs deploying agents is the wedge. |
| social_rs | Reliability-focused AI agent social media connector crate with a RiskGate approval system and MCP server |
| agenticrs | Published crate supporting agent-native tooling infrastructure |
| daemon_rs | Published crate for auditable, sandboxed process/agent execution |
| Agent Safe-Hands Runtime | microVM sandboxing + OpenTelemetry tracing for auditable agent execution (Sentient Foundation-backed research) |
| Agent fleet ops/reliability tooling | Early-stage exploration — tooling for coordination failures (multi-agent races, duplicate work) as fleets of coding agents become common; filling the gap between "ML engineer" and "agent engineer" tooling |
| hone | AI skill preservation/comprehension layer for Cursor, Claude Code, and Copilot — ships domain packs for Rust, Go, React, SQL, and Python so devs keep understanding the code AI writes |
| Agentic SDLC (idea) | Two directions under consideration: (1) smarter AI-assisted SDLC tooling on top of Linear/Cursor/CodeRabbit-style pipelines for human devs, and (2) a fully agent-orchestrated SDLC — idea → ticket → code → review → test → deploy → monitor — gated by a trust layer, a natural extension of social_rs RiskGate |
| Project | Description |
|---|---|
| fastrs | A Rust web framework built on Axum with automatic OpenAPI generation |
| rye_rs | A Laravel/Phoenix-style fullstack Rust framework with CLI scaffolding for Axum/Actix backends and Postgres/MySQL/SQLite |
| aml_rs | Abstract Modeling Language — a correct-by-construction Rust config language that fixes YAML's "Norway problem" via strict typing, schemas, and native migrations. MIT licensed |
| monobloat | A CLI for diagnosing Rust binary bloat via monomorphization analysis |
| circuit_breaker | Rust implementation of the Circuit Breaker pattern for resilient, fault-tolerant systems |
| rate_rs | A universal rate-limiting library for Rust web frameworks |
| mule | A cargo-inspired build and package manager for C++ |
| openzl-rs | Safe, ergonomic Rust bindings and high-level APIs for OpenZL, a graph-based typed compression library for structured data |
| structura | A Rust crate consolidating advanced data structures not in std (tries, skip lists, union-find, and more) into one consistent library |
| protocol-state-rs | (in design) A state-machine crate purpose-built for protocol engineering and distributed systems — timeouts, retries, consensus stages, invalid transitions as protocol errors — including native MCP (Model Context Protocol) support |
| pay-kit-rs | A Rust port of pay-kit, unifying Paystack and Flutterwave payment APIs for the Rust ecosystem |
| Project | Description |
|---|---|
| ProxyPay | A universal payment identity masking layer across banking rails, crypto, and AI agent wallets. Core built in Elixir/OTP, with Rust planned as an SDK/interop layer |
| frost_pay | A FROST 2-of-3 threshold signing + Bitcoin silent payments (BIP-352) proof of concept |
| Clavis | An offline-first RFID/NFC smart lock concept on Hardware-as-a-Service pricing, targeting shared infrastructure across Africa — apartments, warehouses, coworking spaces |
- Contributing to Arrow DAO / Project Quiver, an open-source drone platform — signed CLA, pursuing bounty work
- Competing in Kaggle's AI Agent Security — Multi-Step Tool Attacks competition, a red-teaming benchmark hosted by OpenAI, Google, and IEEE
- Prior contributions to ingonyama-zk Blaze, Pluto Labs Ronkathon (ZK proving systems), and compiler work on Paradigm Solar and Ithacaxyz Odyssey
Security research under HackerOne handle @mhsudo, with confirmed vulnerability reports against Airbnb, Uber, Robinhood, and OKX — including work on email subaddress normalization bypasses and endpoint security around agent sandboxing runtimes.
Active portfolio of protocol and open-source grant work, including applications to NLnet NGI TALER, NLnet NGI Fediversity, Zcash Community Grants, Unlock Protocol, Rocket Pool GMC, Interledger Foundation, Stacks DeGrants, Sentient Foundation, IOTA Labs, Prezenti Grants (Celo), Alpha-Omega (OpenSSF), Deltakit Community Fund, and Base Builder Grants.
- Technical deep-dives, protocol write-ups, and cryptanalysis research notes at mahmudsudo.hashnode.dev
- Essays on philosophy and existential inquiry at The God Hypothesis
Languages: Rust, C++, Elixir, Haskell, Go, Lean (learning) Web: Axum, React, Tailwind CSS, Supabase Infra: AWS (EC2, Lambda), Docker, PostgreSQL, MySQL, bare-metal ops (RAID, capacity planning) Focus areas: protocol design, cryptanalysis, correctness-by-construction, AI agent infrastructure
Building in public, mostly in Rust.