Abdul Manan bio photo

Abdul Manan

Systems Engineer at Cloudflare in Austin, TX. Building networked systems with a focus on Zero Trust, performance, and observability.

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Experience & education

Download resume (PDF) · LinkedIn

Experience

Cloudflare

Systems Engineer · Austin, TX · Nov 2025 - Present

  • Contribute to Cloudflare One and its Zero Trust data plane, supporting policy-driven traffic routing across a global edge network of 50,000+ servers handling billions of requests daily.
  • Build and enhance networking components for TCP termination, regionalization, and security policy enforcement.
  • Improve traffic-flow debugging through packet sampling and telemetry for routing decisions, performance, and policy enforcement.

InterSystems Corporation

Developer Support Engineer · Cambridge, MA · Jul 2023 - Nov 2025

  • Diagnosed networking and kernel security issues in mission-critical InterSystems applications.
  • Developed an ObjectScript performance-tracing API capturing CPU cycles, network connections, database accesses, and function calls.
  • Modified the C ObjectScript compiler to insert instrumentation hooks during compilation.

Siemens

Software Development Intern · Princeton, NJ · Jun 2022 - Aug 2022

Brown University

Research Assistant · Providence, RI · Jan 2021 - May 2023

  • Built a Node.js syscall-filtering tool using dynamic program analysis, reducing exploit potential by 95% with 0-2% performance overhead.
  • Developed distributed QUIC fuzz testing that discovered bugs in Meta and Cloudflare implementations.
  • Compared QUIC and TCP performance: QUIC was up to 20% faster for smaller objects, with negligible differences for pages of 1 MB or larger.

Lahore University of Management Sciences

Research Assistant · Lahore, Pakistan · Jan 2019 - May 2020

  • Investigated mobile video bottlenecks: memory pressure reduced frame rates by up to 80%; kernel memory management and disk I/O caused frame drops of up to 40%.

Coauthored paper: Mobile Web Browsing Under Memory Pressure. Related video research: Coal Not Diamonds: How Memory Pressure Falters Mobile Video QoE, by Talha Waheed and colleagues.

Education

Brown University · Sc.M. in Computer Science · May 2023
GPA: 4.0/4.0. Graduate study in distributed systems, compilers and program analysis, machine learning, cryptography, and software security.

Lahore University of Management Sciences · BS in Computer Science · May 2020
Graduated with Distinction. Focus: computer networking and security.

Selected project: tinyOS-rs

Built a 32-bit RISC-V operating system in no_std Rust with Sv32 virtual memory, process scheduling, system calls, VirtIO drivers, a tar filesystem, a shell, and a TCP/IP stack. Runs in QEMU.

Technical skills

Languages: C, C++, Rust, Python, Go, JavaScript
Systems & tools: Linux, Bash, Docker, eBPF, LLVM, x86, microservices, MySQL
Areas: TCP/IP, QUIC, Zero Trust, distributed systems, compiler instrumentation, program analysis, fuzz testing

Publications