I’m currently building Sarena, an eBPF-based CNI written in Rust using Aya — you can follow the build on GitHub or read the technical write-ups on my blog.
Hi, I am Erwin,
I’ve been curious about technology my entire life. As a kid, I didn’t just use things—I wanted to understand how they really worked. From electromagnetic waves and chip design to compilers, distributed systems, and networking protocols, that curiosity never left.
I studied electronics and informatics (graduated cum laude), and for more than 30 years I’ve been building software from the ground up with a focus on fundamentals, performance, and clean design.
Early in my career, I worked on rendering massive medical datasets and built a distributed ray-tracing system as a hobby. I also wrote my own decompiler to better understand how software behaves under the hood.
Over the years, that curiosity naturally led me toward distributed systems, backend platforms, cloud-native infrastructure, and Kubernetes. Much of my career has been spent designing and building systems that behave predictably as they scale—where resilience, observability, and sound architecture are considered from the outset rather than added later.
Today, I’m particularly interested in how complex systems behave under real-world conditions: concurrency, replication, consistency, networking, failure handling, and performance. I enjoy solving problems where understanding system behaviour is just as important as writing the code itself.
Rust has become an important part of my systems engineering work. While implementing the Raft consensus algorithm, I needed a way to verify it was actually correct under concurrency, so I built porcupine-rs, a linearizability checker with performance improvements over the original Go implementation — I wrote up how it works and why the naive approach doesn’t scale. That same interest in low-level correctness led directly into Sarena, the eBPF-based CNI mentioned above, where I’ve been writing about the dataplane loader, testing eBPF programs where they actually run, and the eBPF verifier.
I’m also the author of libp2p-kotlin, a Kotlin implementation of the libp2p networking stack. Although I no longer actively maintain the project, building it was a rewarding opportunity to explore peer-to-peer networking and protocol design from first principles.
Regardless of the technology, I’m drawn to systems with clear architecture, well-defined boundaries, and designs that remain understandable and maintainable as they evolve. I believe the best engineering solutions balance simplicity, correctness, performance, and long-term maintainability.
I thrive in remote-first, globally distributed engineering teams that value ownership, thoughtful design, and a strong engineering culture. I am particularly interested in fully remote opportunities with international teams building infrastructure software, networking solutions, distributed systems, and cloud-native platforms — domains where engineering depth and a solid understanding of system internals make the difference.
The best way to reach me is via e-mail: erwin.kok@protonmail.com
