# Risul Islam, Ph.D. > Full-Stack Senior Software Engineer, Palo Alto Networks. Location: San Francisco Bay Area, United States Profile: https://flows.cv/risul I, Dr. Risul Islam, graduated from the University of California Riverside. Currently I am working as a Senior Staff SWE at Palo Alto Networks. Key insights of what I do are presented below: • Project: Designing and developing cloud-based RESTful API microservices for FAWKES and Next Gen Firewall (NGFW) • Led the cross-functional collaboration with peers and development of multiple enterprise-level scalable distributed systems driving $700M of revenue every year using the latest technologies of Golang, NodeJs, Python, PHP, GCP, JS, TypeScript, MySQL, and Redis. • Designed and implemented APIs with capability of authorization, authentication, certificate management, encryption, logging, monitoring, alerting, triaging, and deployment that serves about 1M requests daily with 99.99% uptime and 55% reduced latency. • Led the development of several crucial components like Go-based API framework, Jest-based unit testing framework, Node-based readiness check package , configuring alarms and dashboards that speeded up the development process by 10X. • Regular participation in critical thinking for problem solving, code and system health check, diagnosis, resolution, code reviews to ensure best practices, code optimization, prioritization, and documentation contributing to 60% reduction in production errors. • Collaborated with Pentest team to drive threat modeling, harden APIs across 20+ microservices, prevent injection attacks (XSS/ SQL/ XPath), remediating 1500+ CVEs, fix auth flaws, profiling memory risks, and enforcing security standards across the development lifecycle. • Integrate AI/ML models (LLMs, Agents) in day to day user facing product development cycle speeding up the process by 500X. About my PhD: I studied Online Security Forums and GitHub to identify hackers, and malware source code and analyze the alarming patterns using ML, AI, DNN, LLMS and NLP techniques. FInal thought: Architecting scalable, resilient, fault tolerant distributed systems and providing solutions to different real-life problems are my area of expertise. ## Work Experience ### Senior Staff Software Engineer (Full Stack) @ Palo Alto Networks Jan 2024 – Present | Santa Clara County, California, United States • Project: Designing and developing cloud-based RESTful API microservices for FAWKES and Next Gen Firewall (NGFW) • Led the cross-functional collaboration with peers and development of multiple enterprise-level scalable distributed systems driving $700M of revenue every year using the latest technologies of Golang, NodeJs, Python, PHP, GCP, JS, TypeScript, MySQL, and Redis. • Designed and implemented APIs with capability of authorization, authentication, certificate management, encryption, logging, monitoring, alerting, triaging, and deployment that serves about 1M requests daily with 99.99% uptime and 55% reduced latency. • Led the development of several crucial components like Go-based API framework, Jest-based unit testing framework, Node-based readiness check package , configuring alarms and dashboards that speeded up the development process by 10X. • Regular participation in critical thinking for problem solving, code and system health check, diagnosis, resolution, code reviews to ensure best practices, code optimization, prioritization, and documentation contributing to 60% reduction in production errors. • Collaborated with Pentest team to drive threat modeling, harden APIs across 20+ microservices, prevent injection attacks (XSS/ SQL/ XPath), remediating 1500+ CVEs, fix auth flaws, profiling memory risks, and enforcing security standards across the development lifecycle. • Integrate AI/ML models (LLMs, Agents) in day to day user facing product development cycle speeding up the process by 500X. ### Staff Software Engineer (Full Stack) @ Palo Alto Networks Jan 2021 – Jan 2024 | Santa Clara, California, United States Project: Build cloud-based RESTful API microservices for Next-Generation Firewall (NGFW) Developing firewall security-related REST APIs with full capability of authorization, authentication, json-xml conversion, unit testing, debugging, and production deployment. of microservice. • Solving different development problems using advanced data structures and algorithms. • Developing a Go-based API framework with full support of end-to-end unit testing. • Designing industry-level large-scale system infrastructure design, performance monitoring, and maintaining the developer GCP environment to support a full-fledged running platform. • Participating in code reviews to ensure standard, efficient, accurate, and testable code with proper documentation. • Prioritizing product or system bugs/issues and debugging, tracking, and resolving them by trou- bleshooting end-to-end and assessing their impact. • Participating in designing critical security features, standardization, microservice design, micro- project planning, cross-communication, and collaboration with teams to support business needs and profitability. ### Graduate Student Researcher @ University of California, Riverside Jan 2018 – Jan 2021 | Riverside County, California, United States My research interest is Cyber Security using Machine Learning, Data Mining, and NLP. More specifically, I studied Online Security Forums and GitHub to identify hackers, malware source code, and alarming patterns using ML and NLP techniques. ### Software Engineer (Machine Learning) Intern, Summer 21. @ Apple Jan 2021 – Jan 2021 | Cupertino, California, United States WebKit Security and Compatibility Team. • Project: Proposed an ML-based model to prevent website URL tracking. • Suggested, collected, and synthesized requirements and created effective feature roadmaps. • Adapted standard machine learning methods to best exploit modern parallel environments. • Developed highly scalable classifiers leveraging machine learning, data regression, and rules-based models. • Collaborated with the Safari Browser, DevOps, and ML model Deployment engineering team to work with real data ### Summer Research Internship, Summer 19. @ Los Alamos National Laboratory Jan 2019 – Jan 2019 | Los Alamos, New Mexico, USA Developed an efficient and accurate building temperature simulator from scratch using Python and Matlab. Project: Proposed a novel method for Mob Map Inference from Thermal Modeling of a Building. Under Submission in Physical Review X, Nature. ### Lecturer @ University of Asia Pacific Jan 2016 – Jan 2017 | Dhaka, Bangladesh Conducting undergraduate courses in Computer Science department as well as performing directed research. ### Software Engineer @ QI Analysis Jan 2015 – Jan 2016 | Dhaka, Bangladesh Developed the front-end and the google Login system in the CRM ## Education ### Ph.D. in Computer Science University of California, Riverside Jan 2017 – Jan 2021 ### Bachelor's degree in Computer Science Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology ## Contact & Social - LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/risul09 - GitHub: https://github.com/RisulIslam --- Source: https://flows.cv/risul JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/risul/resume.json Last updated: 2026-03-22