# Rizmari Versfeld > Software Engineer Location: San Francisco Bay Area, United States Profile: https://flows.cv/rizmari ## Work Experience ### Staff Software Engineer @ Block Jan 2021 – Present | San Francisco, California, United States ### Software Engineer @ Snowfork Jan 2020 – Jan 2021 Contributing engineer on Snowbridge, a blockchain infrastructure initiative building a trustless bridge between Ethereum and Polkadot funded by Web3. https://docs.snowbridge.network/ Code: https://github.com/Snowfork/snowbridge Implemented foundational security features for the bridge incl. an embedded Eth light client and continuous benchmarking. Built service to relay events with security metadata from Ethereum to Polkadot. This was technically complex work that required a deep understanding of blockchain fundamentals. Collaborated with engineers spread across the globe (Berlin, Cape Town, Mexico City, NYC, SF) ### Software Engineer @ Facebook Jan 2017 – Jan 2019 | San Francisco Bay Area I spent the majority of my time at Facebook in the Privacy org, driving key initiatives on everything from GDPR readiness, data lifecycle across all Facebook products, to the handling and compliance elements of privacy incidents. During my time on the team, Facebook made a larger pivot towards privacy and data control and I was responsible for helping grow the team, and those on it, to meet this wider scope of responsibility. I drove foundational work to ensure end-user control over their data, across all Facebook products. Some of my roles included: * Team tech lead for a new team that focused on data access & lifecycle across all FB product areas. This was part of the larger org's goal around setting new industry standards for data stewardship by expanding end user access & control of their data. This was a highly collaborative role that required recruiting partner teams to build key privacy features, as well as supporting teams (all FB teams that generate user data) integrating with our platform via tooling and design reviews. The work was also deeply technical, involving implementing substantive novel privacy features, and work such as performance optimization of privacy checks (as these checks are hit numerous times per FB newsfeed load). My work significantly expanded the platform that lets end users manage their data footprint on FB. * Eng lead for company-critical GDPR "Right to Access" project This was a highly cross-functional and collaborative role, that required understanding the data implications of most product teams at Facebook. * Owning Facebook Lite app privacy Facebook Lite is designed for feature phones and is used by 100s of millions of users daily. Achieved feature parity between FBLite and first generation FB apps, unlocking critical privacy features for poorly connected users for the first time. This included fundamental controls like the ability to change privacy settings on posts, view ones Activity Log, etc. ### Software Engineer @ Facebook Jan 2015 – Jan 2017 | London, United Kingdom During this time I worked on Ads for Emerging Markets. Some of this work includes: * Owned Slideshow video ads product Implemented new ad creation flows * Optimized ad ranking ML models w.r.t. video bitrate and client bandwidth Extended ad ranking services for feature called "dynamic language optimization" Improves ROI for advertisers targeting multi-language audiences ### Software developer @ Praekelt Foundation Jan 2015 – Jan 2015 | Cape Town, South Africa ### Developer and Maintainer of pygame-cffi @ CTPUG, PyPy and Raspberry Pi Jan 2014 – Jan 2015 Development of pygame-cffi, a PyPy-compatible, drop-in replacement for Pygame, the Python games dev package. I re-implemented the core modules using CFFI. ### Freelance Software Developer @ Code For Africa Jan 2014 – Jan 2014 Development of Siyazana, a project to map economic and political connections in South Africa. My work entails a lot of data wrangling: scraping, cleaning and de-duping data, for example. I also extend the capabilities of our main backend technology, Grano, and I do some Flask web development for our user-facing site. ### Freelance Software Developer @ Code for South Africa Jan 2014 – Jan 2014 Development of Wazimap, a data liberation project that makes South African census and elections data accessible. The bulk of work was done using Python with Flask and SQLAlchemy. ### Software developer @ Praekelt Consulting Jan 2012 – Jan 2014 | Cape Town Full stack web development of client applications and supporting services using Django and Javascript. In addition to general web development, my work included core development of the Jmbo CMS and project leadership and management. ### Computer Scientist @ ThoughtExpress Jan 2011 – Jan 2012 | Greenpoint, Cape Town ### Computer Scientist @ ThoughtExpress Jan 2011 – Jan 2011 | Greenpoint, Cape Town Holiday software development work in the fields of computer networking and graphics/visualization. Some lovely networking done with Python's Twisted and plenty of WebGL (i.e. Javascript). Nothing quite like OpenGL ES and GLSL! ### Programmer @ Tasty Poison Games Jan 2010 – Jan 2011 | Muizenberg, Cape Town Holiday work as games programmer. Worked on AI, interface design and much more for the iOS games Dragooo and PocketRPG. We used the Unity games engine with C#/Mono and a bit of fiddling with Objective-C. ### Research Intern @ University of Cape Town Jan 2009 – Jan 2010 | Rondebosch, Cape Town Worked for UCT's Digital Libraries Laboratory on a Second Life exhibit of the Bleek & Lloyd project (http://lloydbleekcollection.cs.uct.ac.za/). The exhibit was hosted on some virtual land owned by Virginia Tech. This work produced a short paper (unpublished) and a demo which was accepted for the ECDL 2010 (http://www.ecdl2010.org/?page_id=646). ## Education ### Bachelor of Science (B.Sc.) (Hons) in Computer Science University of Cape Town ### Bachelor of Science (B.Sc.) in Computer Science University of Cape Town ## Contact & Social - LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/rizmari --- Source: https://flows.cv/rizmari JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/rizmari/resume.json Last updated: 2026-04-12