David Spickett
Principal Software Engineer at Arm
United Kingdom
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolDavid Spickett is a Principal Software Engineer at Arm with 14 years of experience building and testing compiler and toolchain infrastructure. He has progressed through senior technical roles at Arm after earlier embedded and RF software work at Imagination Technologies and NXP, combining systems-level engineering with pragmatic delivery. A regular open-source contributor, David has made substantive backend and compiler integrations to high-profile projects like Compiler Explorer and LLVM—adding a TableGen backend, tooling for dwarfdump, and extensive test-suite enhancements. He blends deep compiler knowledge with test automation expertise, routinely improving cross-platform test coverage and build integrations. Based in the UK with an MEng in Electronic Engineering from the University of Leeds, he brings a hardware-aware perspective that often surfaces in tooling and debug-info improvements. Peers describe him as a quietly influential engineer who turns intricate compiler internals into reliable developer-facing tools.
14 years of coding experience
12 years of employment as a software developer
Master of Engineering - MEng Electronic Engineering, Master of Engineering - MEng Electronic Engineering at University of Leeds
Github Skills (20)
maintenance10
c-language10
llvm10
codegen10
compiler-design10
test-suite10
cprogramming-language10
test-automation10
markdown9
markdown-it9
assembly8
build-system7
linux7
cmake7
arm6
Programming languages (13)
Github contributions (5)
llvm/llvm-project
Mar 2022 - Jan 2023
The LLVM Project is a collection of modular and reusable compiler and toolchain technologies.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & Test Automation Engineer
Back-end Developer & Test Automation EngineerContributions:963 reviews, 6 commits, 519 PRs in 10 months
Contributions summary:David's contributions primarily revolve around maintaining and expanding LLVM's testing infrastructure. The commits involve significant modifications to the test suite, including converting existing test files to Markdown, addressing code quality concerns with clang-format, and enabling or disabling tests on different operating systems based on specific characteristics of the build environment. The user's work includes writing test cases for validating new features, such as those related to the register file, and improving existing tests, such as those for handling the guard control stack. The user also implements tests against remote systems.
compilerstechnologiesclangsubmittoolchain
compiler-explorer/compiler-explorer
Oct 2022 - Nov 2022
Run compilers interactively from your web browser and interact with the assembly
Role in this project:Backend & Compiler Engineer
Backend & Compiler EngineerContributions:27 reviews, 4 commits, 21 PRs in 17 days
Contributions summary:David significantly contributed to the LLVM TableGen compiler integration within Compiler Explorer. Their work includes adding the TableGen language mode, implementing a compiler backend for TableGen, and integrating it with the build and override systems. They also added a LLVM dwarfdump tool for C/C++ languages, expanding the capabilities of the tool to analyze debug information. Further contributions encompass improvements to the display of override favorites.
compilerscppbrowserrusthaskell
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