Brian Duff
Distinguished Software Engineer at LinkedIn
California, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolBrian Duff is a Distinguished Software Engineer with 15+ years of experience scaling developer platforms and modernizing engineering systems at companies like LinkedIn, Google, Facebook, and Twitter. He specializes in improving developer productivity—leading large teams, defining developer experience metrics, and driving migrations of core tools and build systems to accelerate thousands of engineers. His hands-on background spans infrastructure, build systems, Android platform features, and AI/ML-driven productivity tools, and he contributes to notable open-source projects such as Protocol Buffers and Buck. Based in California, Brian combines strategic technical leadership with a taste for random side projects, demonstrating both deep systems expertise and a practical, curious approach to solving hard engineering problems.
15 years of coding experience
25 years of employment as a software developer
BSc (Hons) Computer Science, BSc (Hons) Computer Science at University of St Andrews
German, Chinese
Stackoverflow
416reputation
22kreached
15answers
1question
Github Skills (19)
kotlin10
protocol-buffers10
data-serialization10
java10
serialization10
javas10
proto10
android10
build-tools10
protobuf10
marshalling9
eclipse6
swing6
google-play-services6
google-nearby6
Programming languages (10)
Github contributions (5)
facebook/buck
May 2019 - Jan 2021
A fast build system that encourages the creation of small, reusable modules over a variety of platforms and languages.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:63 commits, 1 PR, 1 branch in 1 year 8 months
Contributions summary:Brian primarily focused on fixing bugs and improving the build process for the Buck build system, particularly related to Android app bundles and Kotlin. They addressed issues with Kotlin compilation, memory leaks in the CXX toolchain, and incorrect aapt2 configurations. The user also contributed to the suppression of log messages to reduce log verbosity, and added functionality and configuration options to support Android build tools, which demonstrates a good understanding of build system infrastructure.
buckpythonplatformsandroidlanguages
protocolbuffers/protobuf
Apr 2015 - Jun 2015
Protocol Buffers - Google's data interchange format
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:3 PRs, 5 comments in 1 month
Contributions summary:Brian primarily contributed to the protocol buffers (protobuf) project, focusing on the Java Nano (javanano) implementation. Their work involved fixing compiler issues related to code generation for enums, particularly with the java_multiple_files option. Additionally, the user added features for handling extensions and unknown fields within the Java Nano library and implemented support for the `clone()` method. They also addressed related bug fixes to ensure correct serialization and deserialization behavior.
protocol-buffersrpcgoogle-protocol-buffersinterchange-formatmarshalling
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