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about

Warren Kenny
name
Warren Kenny
handle
@wrren
location
Ireland
status
online
clearance
guest

I'm Warren — I build backend systems and the libraries that hold them together. Most of my open-source work lives in the BEAM ecosystem: Erlang and Elixir libraries for type coercion, SAML auth, AWS, HTTP middleware and more.

Below the VM I like C, C++ and Rust: binary format parsers, process injectors, DDC monitor control, and whatever Advent of Code throws at me in December.

Professionally, I work for Riot Games on the Anti-Cheat team, slapping cheaters, working on the client, back-end, and tooling.

I'm a generalist by temperament: I've shipped production systems in C, C++, Go, Elixir, Erlang, Java, Objective-C and Python, spanning kernel code, distributed backends, game engines and mobile apps. My Ph.D. from Trinity College Dublin was in distributed systems, specifically scalable routing and service discovery for mobile ad hoc networks.

01

experience

git log --graph --oneline career
  1. dc5a4d5(HEAD -> main)2020 — present

    Senior Principal Engineer, Anti-Cheat

    @ Riot Games

    Technical lead on Riot Vanguard, the kernel-level anti-cheat protecting VALORANT and League of Legends, working across the full stack from kernel to cloud. Promoted from Principal Engineer in 2021.

    • Lead and mentor engineers across the client, platform and tooling sub-teams, and set technical direction across them
    • Develop Vanguard's Windows kernel driver, user-mode service and anti-cheat modules in C/C++
    • Built detections responsible for 100K+ bans; designed systems that rendered pixelbot and triggerbot cheats non-functional, and defeated emulation-based evasion
    • Build and operate the backend platform: Go microservices on AWS, MongoDB, ElastiCache/Valkey and Docker, plus SRE work on observability, alerting and incident response
    • Delivered client and platform cost optimisations saving ~$10M over five years
    • Pioneered the use of AI within the team, building purpose-built harnesses for automation, code review and cheater investigations

    CC++GoWindows InternalsWinDbgAWSMongoDBValkeyDocker

  2. 4896e8c2015 — 2020

    Senior → Staff → Principal Security Engineer & Product Lead

    @ Riot Games

    Led Riot's Application Security team, forming team vision and strategy and overseeing execution. Built automated tooling for product security assessment and metrics gathering.

    • Sightstone: an Erlang web dashboard for triaging bug bounty tickets, voting on valuations and tracking responsiveness and vulnerability trends
    • Sweeper: an Elixir + React static analysis platform that picked the right scanners for a repo, normalised their findings into a single report, and notified engineers in Slack

    ErlangElixirReact

  3. b53d4042012 — 2015

    Lead Software Engineer

    @ Upfront Analytics

    One of the first hires, covering the entire technical spectrum from architecting the core services to DevOps to mobile apps.

    • Led the design of the mobile game 'The Pryz Manor' and its Java/OpenGL engine; it won Best Gaming App and Most Useful Business App at The Appys 2014
    • Co-developed a highly available Erlang game server handling chat, messaging, content distribution and real-time multiplayer
    • Led the port of the game to a cross-platform C++11 codebase targeting Android, iOS, Windows, Linux and macOS

    Erlang/OTPJavaC++11PHPMySQLOpenGLAWS

  4. 66bb4ac2010 — 2013

    Founder

    @ Radicle Design

    Co-founded a mobile development studio, often sub-contracted to build the difficult parts of apps that existing teams could not. Clients included Jameson Ireland, Aviva Insurance, Return2Sender and Onestream.tv.

    Objective-CJavaAndroidiOSOpenCV

  5. 0eb45a52008 — 2011

    Software Engineer

    @ Suura

    Designed and built the Suura core client across multiple platforms, including mobile clients for Android, Symbian and iPhone.

    C++JavaPHPMySQLSymbian

  6. d7d42f52007

    Intern Developer

    @ Demonware

    Extended Demonware's BitDemon game networking system to let players traverse strict NAT devices.

  7. 0000000 initial commit: hello, world
02

education

2007 — 2012

Ph.D., Computer Science

Trinity College Dublin

Distributed Systems Group. Designed a low-overhead service discovery protocol for mobile ad hoc networks in C++, evaluated in NS2. Passed the viva voce with no corrections.

2010 — 2011

Diploma in Statistics

Trinity College Dublin

2003 — 2007

B.A., B.A.I., Computer & Electronic Engineering

Trinity College Dublin

03

publications

04

dependencies

~/wrren/package.json
{
  "name": "wrren",
  "version": "18.0.0",
  "license": "MIT",
  "languages": ["C", "C++", "Go", "Elixir", "Erlang", "Java", "Objective-C", "Python", "Rust"],  "systems": ["Windows kernel drivers", "Windows Internals", "WinDbg", "Anti-cheat & detection"],  "backend": ["Go microservices", "OTP", "Phoenix", "MongoDB", "Valkey", "MySQL"],  "infra": ["AWS", "Docker", "Observability", "Incident response", "GitHub Actions"],  "research": ["Distributed systems", "MANET routing", "Service discovery"]}