Brent Vatne
VP Of Engineering at Expo
Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top School
Top expert inCross-Platform Mobile Development with React Native
Brent Vatne is a seasoned engineering leader with 14 years of experience building and scaling developer tooling and mobile-first experiences, currently serving as VP of Engineering at Expo in Vancouver. He rose through the ranks at Expo from software engineer to engineering manager before taking the VP role, combining hands-on full-stack development with strategic product and team leadership. A prolific open-source contributor to the React Native ecosystem, his work spans high-impact projects like react-navigation, react-native core, gesture handling, and Expo tooling (expo-cli, EAS), improving navigation, UI components, and developer workflows used by millions. Brent blends deep mobile iOS/Android expertise with front-end craftsmanship—often focusing on nuanced UX behaviors like gesture handling, safe-area layouts, and animation tuning. He also has a background in consulting across industries and languages (Ruby/Rails, ClojureScript, PostgreSQL), which gives him a practical, cross-stack perspective when aligning engineering with customer needs. Known for shipping pragmatic solutions and refining developer experiences, he quietly influences how apps are built and debugged across the React Native community.
14 years of coding experience
14 years of employment as a software developer
Pontificia Universidad Católica de ChileBBA Management Information Systems Computer Science Spanish, BBA Management Information Systems Computer Science Spanish at Simon Fraser University
Stackoverflow
7,828reputation
505kreached
135answers
1question
react-native
top-1%
javascript
top-5%
Github Skills (68)
tabstrip10
mobile-development10
website-development10
sentry10
gesture-recognizer10
ui-components10
animated10
navigationbar10
gesture10
navigation-drawer10
react-navigation-v610
videojs10
website-design10
javascript10
bottom-tabs10
Programming languages (19)
Github contributions (5)
expo/expo-cli
Jul 2019 - Nov 2022
Tools for creating, running, and deploying universal Expo and React Native apps
Role in this project:
Mobile Developer
Mobile DeveloperContributions:402 reviews, 270 commits, 379 PRs in 3 years 3 months
Contributions summary:Brent primarily focused on updating the Expo CLI, particularly in relation to the "Expo Go" client. Their contributions included renaming the client, installing and uninstalling it for Android and iOS, and addressing issues related to unversioned apps. Additionally, the user made changes to improve various error messages and handled version checks for Node.js and dependencies.
deployingreactreact-nativewebpacknative-apps
react-navigation/react-native-safe-area-view
Feb 2018 - Jan 2021
⚠️ Deprecated: use the successor react-native-safe-area-context instead!
Role in this project:Front-end Developer
Front-end DeveloperContributions:54 commits, 45 PRs, 49 pushes in 2 years 11 months
Contributions summary:Brent primarily contributed to updating and maintaining the `react-native-safe-area-view` repository, which is now deprecated. Their work involved refactoring and adapting the code for integration with `react-native-safe-area-context`, the successor library. The user focused on updating dimensions and layout functionalities. Several commits centered around updating the codebase and the example project for the library.
react-native-safe-area-contextreactreact-nativesafe-areasuccessor
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