George Tankersley has joined the Zcash Foundation as our director of engineering! George is a software engineer and cryptographer with years of experience working on large-scale internet security infrastructure. He is passionate about getting high-end privacy tech into ordinary people’s hands, a goal that dovetails perfectly with the Foundation’s mission.

Most recently, George worked as a cryptographic engineer at the Electric Coin Company. He participated in the final stages of Sapling development and designed the shielded light wallet protocol. Before working at ECC, he wrote high-performance Go, gave talks, and deployed anonymous credentials at scale.

George is a huge believer in open-source software. He has contributed variously to Tor, Kubernetes, and Ristretto, among other projects. George’s more commercial efforts have included aspects of a container-based Linux distribution and one of the first non-Google Certificate Transparency logs.

As the Foundation’s director of engineering, George will take responsibility for all of our engineering efforts, especially our independent Zcash node Zebra. He will replace Josh Cincinnati as the Foundation’s ZIP editor. George looks forward to collaborating with the Electric Coin Company and other contributors to develop the Zcash ecosystem.