Brett Camper
Senior Engineering Manager, Map Rendering at Snap Inc.
New York, New York, United States
Summary
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Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolBrett Camper is a senior engineering manager specializing in map rendering and geospatial systems, with 12+ years building teams and products that make complex spatial data accessible and expressive. He co-founded Mapzen and led development of the Tangram WebGL/OpenGL engine, driving novel cartography features like user-defined GLSL shaders and complex text shaping that powered high-profile projects such as the New York Times’ live election maps. Brett has scaled product and engineering organizations at Kickstarter and the ACLU, blending hands-on backend and database work with product strategy to deliver mission-driven applications and advocacy tools. His consulting work influenced mapping stacks at Facebook and HERE, and his open-source contributions include substantive backend enhancements to Tilezen’s vector-datasource for richer building and address layers. With academic roots in media history and comparative ideas (MIT and UW), he brings a rare mix of humanities-informed thinking and technical depth to visualization, civic engagement, and creative mapping. Based in New York, he focuses on tooling and rendering innovations that help people explore data and tell stories with maps.
12 years of coding experience
21 years of employment as a software developer
B.A., Comparative History of Ideas, B.A., Comparative History of Ideas at University of WashingtonM.S., Comparative Media Studies, M.S., Comparative Media Studies at Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Stackoverflow
1reputation
0reached
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Github Skills (13)
openstreetmap10
vector-tiles10
plpgsql10
databases10
pgsql10
psql10
postgresql10
sql10
pg10
database10
cartography9
python5
geojson4
Programming languages (9)
Github contributions (5)
tilezen/vector-datasource
Dec 2013 - Jul 2019
Tilezen vector tile service - OpenStreetMap data in several formats
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & Database Engineer
Back-end Developer & Database EngineerContributions:1 review, 40 commits, 4 PRs in 5 years 8 months
Contributions summary:Brett primarily contributed to the back-end logic of the vector tile service, focusing on optimizing and extending the building layer. Their work involved modifying PostgreSQL queries to include building parts, refining height calculations, and incorporating additional data, such as roof properties and address information. They also introduced new functionalities, such as including waterway=dock and railway=subway, and refactored code to include new layers for specific OSM maps.
pythonfltkmap-editortilesetmapzen
tangrams/match-feature
Mar 2015 - Dec 2016
Contributions:6 releases, 13 commits, 11 pushes in 1 year 9 months
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