Brian Ferris
Senior Staff Software Engineer at Google
Seattle, Washington, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolBrian Ferris is a Senior Staff Software Engineer with 16 years of experience building transportation and urban-mobility features for Google Maps from his Seattle base. He blends deep back-end expertise in transit standards (GTFS/GTFS-realtime) with practical engineering—contributing to well-known open-source projects like OpenTripPlanner and Google’s transitfeed and gtfs-realtime-bindings to improve data validation, language bindings, and multi-modal routing. His work spans production-grade bug fixes, refactors, and test automation for tricky edge cases such as repeated stops and frequency data, demonstrating a focus on resilient data pipelines. With a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Washington and a BS from NC State, he pairs academic rigor with hands-on shipping at scale. Notably, he quietly drives interoperability across ecosystems by adapting protocol buffers and GTFS libraries to multiple languages and platforms.
16 years of coding experience
Doctor of Philosophy - PhD, Computer Science, Doctor of Philosophy - PhD, Computer Science at University of WashingtonBachelor of Science - BS, Computer Science, Bachelor of Science - BS, Computer Science at North Carolina State University
Github Skills (14)
javas10
php10
javascript10
gtfs10
api10
csharp10
data-validation10
python10
apidoc10
java10
dotnet-core10
protocol-buffers10
ruby10
code-generation9
Programming languages (5)
Github contributions (5)
google/transitfeed
Oct 2011 - Mar 2015
A Python library for reading, validating, and writing transit schedule information in the GTFS format.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & Test Automation Engineer
Back-end Developer & Test Automation EngineerContributions:1 release, 85 commits, 1 PR in 3 years 5 months
Contributions summary:Brian primarily contributed to the `google/transitfeed` repository by implementing new features and fixing bugs related to GTFS data validation. They developed tests for edge cases, such as handling consecutive stop times with the same time and validating frequency data, and adding support for features like `bikes_allowed` and `wheelchair_accessible`. Additionally, they refactored code to improve the quality of validation checks and to upgrade the schedule viewer to use the V3 API.
python-librarypythonschedule-informationgtfsgtfs-format
MobilityData/gtfs-realtime-bindings
Jan 2015 - Jul 2015
Language bindings generated from the GTFS Realtime protocol buffer spec for popular languages.
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:94 commits, 3 PRs, 42 pushes in 6 months
Contributions summary:Brian's commits focus on generating language bindings for the GTFS Realtime protocol buffer specification. The primary contribution involves creating and adapting code in Python, Ruby, Javascript, .NET and PHP. The changes include initial implementations of language-specific bindings and updating them in order to incorporate the latest version of the gtfs-realtime.proto file.
realtimebufferrealtime-protocolgtfs-realtimespec
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