Anna Zaks
People And Technical Leader, Senior Manager Of Compilers And Security Tools Group at LLVM Foundation
Mountain View, California, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolAnna Zaks is a people-and-technical leader with 15 years of experience building and managing compiler and security tooling teams at Apple, now senior manager of the Compilers and Security Tools Group in Mountain View. She combines deep hands-on expertise in static analysis and Clang/Swift compiler internals—evidenced by sustained contributions to clang and apple/swift-clang focused on analyzer accuracy, memory-safety checks, and diagnostics—with a PhD background in formal methods and compiler verification. Anna sits on the LLVM Foundation board, bridging open-source compiler governance and large-scale engineering at a major platform vendor. Known for improving analyzer maintainability and extending taint-propagation and API-misuse checks, she hires and mentors engineers across locations from Cupertino to London. Her career blends academic rigor with production-grade tool-building, making her equally comfortable reviewing proofs and shipping developer-facing diagnostics.
15 years of coding experience
20 years of employment as a software developer
Master of Science - MS Computer Science, Master of Science - MS Computer Science at The City University of New YorkPhD Computer Science - Formal Methods and Compiler Verification (advisor: Amir Pnueli), PhD Computer Science - Formal Methods and Compiler Verification (advisor: Amir Pnueli) at New York UniversityIgor Sikorsky Kyiv Polytechnic Institute
Github Skills (7)
memory-management10
objective-c10
c-language10
static-analysis10
cprogramming-language10
compiler-development10
api-design8
Programming languages (5)
Github contributions (5)
llvm-mirror/clang
Jul 2011 - Nov 2017
Mirror kept for legacy. Moved to https://github.com/llvm/llvm-project
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:875 commits in 6 years 5 months
Contributions summary:Anna's commits primarily focus on enhancements and bug fixes within the clang/clang compiler project, specifically targeting the static analyzer. Their contributions include improvements to error messages, the addition of features like the ability to embed the analyzer version into the output, and refactoring of the codebase. The user also worked on improvements to the code analysis of Objective-C code related to nullability and retain-release issues. The user's work centered on enhancing the accuracy, functionality, and maintainability of the static analyzer.
llvmcompilerc-plus-pluscobjective-c
apple/swift-clang
Nov 2015 - Mar 2017
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:27 commits, 5 pushes in 1 year 4 months
Contributions summary:Anna primarily contributed to the Clang Static Analyzer within the `apple/swift-clang` repository. Their work involved fixing bugs in the analyzer, particularly related to memory management, nullability checks, and the handling of blocking functions. They also added support for new features and improved diagnostics to enhance the tool's ability to identify memory errors and API misuse. Furthermore, the user introduced checks for CFNumberGetValue API misuse and extended the taint propagation, demonstrating a focus on improving the static analysis capabilities of the compiler.
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