Aaron Smith

Seattle, Washington, United States

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Summary

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Rockstar

🎓

Top School

Aaron Smith is a systems-focused software engineer and researcher with nearly two decades of experience spanning optimizing compilers, embedded and reconfigurable systems, distributed systems, and machine learning. He has held senior research and academic posts—including Senior Principal Research Manager at Microsoft and Reader/Honorary Fellow at the University of Edinburgh—bridging industrial R&D and university research. Aaron is a prolific low-level contributor to LLVM-related projects (notably enhancing LLDB and clang test chains and improving ARM/X86 backends), demonstrating deep expertise in debug info, symbol resolution, and code generation. His background combines practical product experience (from backend compiler engineering to e-commerce management) with advanced academic credentials from UT Austin, where he studied computer science and Japanese. Colleagues value him for translating formal research into robust compiler tooling and for spotting subtle correctness issues in complex binary and debug formats.

9 years of coding experience

23 years of employment as a software developer

PhD Computer Science, PhD Computer Science at The University of Texas at Austin

Japanese

Github Skills (26)

debugging10

debug10

assembly10

c-language10

llvm10

testing10

lldb10

x8610

code-analysis10

compiler-compiler10

assembler10

arm10

compiler10

cprogramming-language10

static-code-analysis9

Programming languages (7)

C++CLLVMPHPHTMLMLIRPython

Github contributions (5)

microsoft/llvm-mctoll

Oct 2018 - Jan 2020

llvm-mctoll

Role in this project:

Back-end Developer

Contributions:2 reviews, 26 commits, 24 PRs in 1 year 2 months

Contributions summary:Aaron primarily focused on improving the compilation of ARM assembly code within the LLVM project. Their contributions involved correctly raising signed immediates for 32-bit ARM binaries, ensuring accurate handling of negative immediate values. They also fixed an issue in the X86 back end, specifically addressing a scenario where a basic block had identical predecessors and successors, thus improving code generation. Furthermore, the user updated several files to align with the Apache License v2.0 with LLVM Exceptions.

armv7x86x86-64armllvm

llvm-mirror/lldb

Dec 2017 - Aug 2019

Project moved to: https://github.com/llvm/llvm-project

Role in this project:

Back-end Developer

Contributions:62 commits in 1 year 8 months

Contributions summary:Aaron primarily contributed to the LLDB (LLDB) debugger, focusing on enhancing its capabilities and fixing bugs related to PDB symbol files. They implemented features such as parsing and resolving function symbols, supporting the resolution of variable symbols, and improving the handling of function-level linking and splitted functions. Their work also involved debugging and correcting issues related to type resolution and the identification of source file paths within the PDB.

llvm

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