From Rust Advocate to Confidential Computing Pioneer: Tian Hongliang’s Journey at Ant Group

Ant Group’s campus recruitment season showcases top technical talent, featuring Tian Hongliang—a distinguished coder, Rust evangelist, and former champion of the company’s “Super MA Power Competition,” where his use of Rust gave him a performance edge over Java and Python competitors.

Following his success, Tian promoted Rust within Ant, delivering public courses and becoming a Rust advocate for Alibaba Cloud, while emphasizing the importance of engineering skills over pure academic achievements and recommending books such as “The Art of Readable Code” and “Code Complete.”

During his PhD, Tian focused on operating systems and later turned to hardware‑level security, identifying Intel’s Software Guard Extensions (SGX) as a promising technology for protecting sensitive data through enclaves, a core component of confidential computing.

After a stint at Intel, he returned to Ant to lead confidential‑computing efforts, contributing to the open‑source project Occlum (an Enclave libOS) that enables applications to run inside SGX enclaves with minimal code changes—e.g., a three‑command deployment of a traditional Hello World program.

Occlum was accepted at the ASPLOS conference, highlighting its academic impact, and has been integrated into Ant’s SOFAEnclave middleware to protect data for workloads such as XGBoost and TensorFlow.

The article also notes the growing industry interest in confidential computing, citing Gartner’s 2019 cloud‑security maturity curve and the launch of confidential‑computing services by major cloud providers.

Finally, Ant’s secure‑computing team issues a recruitment call, outlining requirements (knowledge of C/C++, Java, Go, or Rust; expertise in OS, containers, virtualization, compilers, architecture, program analysis, formal verification, or trusted computing) and providing contact information for interested candidates.