# Karan Kurbur

> Lead Backend @ Worldcoin

Location: San Francisco Bay Area, United States
Profile: https://flows.cv/karankurbur

B.S. in Computer Science from the University of Washington

## Work Experience
### Protocol Engineer @ Tools for Humanity
Jan 2025 – Present

### Lead Backend Engineer @ Tools for Humanity
Jan 2023 – Jan 2024 | San Francisco, California, United States
Led the migration from Optimism to World Chain by developing a centralized bridge handling over $100M in assets and serving 10M+ users, deploying critical infrastructure smart contracts (e.g., Safe, Uniswap), and collaborating with external vendors for network support.

Built a transaction relayer service (OpenZepplin Defender replacement) that consumed 50% of Optimism blockspace and reduced cost by $300k/yr

Maintained 99.9% uptime as sole maintainer of World App's off-chain infrastructure, supporting 10m users and over 1m daily transactions

Interviewed, onboarded, and led the crypto infrastructure team from 1 to 5 engineers, reducing average incident response time by 50%

Provided technical vision and leadership while architecting a new backend, resulting in a 40% boost in developer productivity

### Software Engineer @ BitGo
Jan 2020 – Jan 2023
Tech lead for implementing a threshold signature schema (TSS) for a chain agnostic
retail wallet. Created a microservice that facilitates decentralized key generation and
signing. Created a signing client for mobile and browser extension.

Led team of 3 engineers in developing MetaMask Institutional (MMI), the first
institutional-grade multisig browser wallet (partnership with ConsenSys). Generalized MMI to work for all EVM chains.

Built a defi-specific policy engine (velocity, whitelist, approver thresholds). 

Migrated multisig repo from Truffle to Hardhat and formalized a smart contract
deployment pipeline that is used to manage and deploy different versions of our
multisig wallet contract.

Audited ETH multisig smart contract wallets to add support for sending and receiving
NFTs (ERC721 / ERC1155).

Owned cross-platform refactor for EIP1559 transaction building and parsing in
response to the London ETH hard fork with no downtime.

Optimized transaction broadcasting logic to handle 10x volume increase through
BitGo’s ETH wallets.

### Contractor @ Cryptonics
Jan 2020 – Jan 2020
Built a challenge-response protocol that allowed users to authenticate using
cryptographic signatures.
Developed a client library to upload and manage public keys using the W3C
DID standard.

### Full Stack Engineer @ Global Currency Organization
Jan 2019 – Jan 2020 | San Francisco Bay Area
Developed applications to provide all critical functions of a stablecoin business including smart contract deployment/ integration, admin/compliance portal, and integrations with banking partners.
Designed the admin portal to allow back office users to handle all user management functionality (KYC/Compliance) and mint/redeem operations.
Integrated smart contracts with the backend, allowing users to automatically mint ERC-20 stablecoin by wiring our banking partner.

### Backend/Mobile Engineer @ Verified Inc.
Jan 2018 – Jan 2019 | San Francisco
Developed iOS/Android applications using React-Native that allows users to store and share cryptographically signed address, phone, and email credentials.
Designed a novel solution for verifying residential addresses by sending a unique QR code via the Lob API, which users could scan to receive a credential.
Architected an integration between Verified Inc and a political messaging tool to prove messages originated from verified constituents.
Hired as the first employee.

### Application Security Intern @ WhiteHat Security
Jan 2016 – Jan 2016 | Santa Clara, CA
Researched characteristics of customer’s websites and configured application vulnerability scanners to detect security flaws in their web applications. 
Leveraged benchmarking tools and internal analysis to maximize identification of vulnerabilities in customer’s production websites.


## Education
### Bachelor of Science - BS in Computer Science & Systems
University of Washington

### High School
The Harker School


## Contact & Social
- LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/karan-kurbur

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Source: https://flows.cv/karankurbur
JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/karankurbur/resume.json
Last updated: 2026-04-11