Derek Schuff
Staff Software Engineer at Google
San Francisco Bay Area United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolDerek Schuff is a Staff Software Engineer and systems enthusiast in the San Francisco Bay Area with 14 years of experience building and optimizing compilers, runtimes, and low-level systems. He has played technical lead roles on WebAssembly, Native Client, and Chromium projects at Google, bringing research-grade compiler and performance techniques into shipping developer tools. His open-source contributions span LLVM, Emscripten, Binaryen, and the WebAssembly spec—where he implemented language features and streamlined build and release automation for widely used toolchains. Comfortable across assembly, parallel performance analysis, and CI/CD for complex builds, he’s known for making “invisible” infrastructure both correct and fast. Trained as a PhD computer engineer, he combines deep measurement-driven performance work (reuse-distance and parallel sampling research) with pragmatic engineering that improves developer workflows.
14 years of coding experience
7 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor's Degree, Computer Engineering, Bachelor's Degree, Computer Engineering at Tennessee Technological UniversityDoctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Computer Engineering, Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Computer Engineering at Purdue University
Stackoverflow
66reputation
1kreached
2answers
0questions
Github Skills (45)
github-ci10
c-language10
parser10
python10
back-end-development10
llvm10
bitwise10
build-system10
c1110
cicd10
x8610
c1710
abi10
release-management10
automation10
Programming languages (13)
Github contributions (5)
WebAssembly/binaryen
Jan 2016 - Jan 2023
Optimizer and compiler/toolchain library for WebAssembly
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:17 releases, 105 reviews, 153 commits in 7 years 1 month
Contributions summary:Derek focused on improving the Binaryen optimizer and compiler for WebAssembly. Their work involved fixing constructor calls to prevent build errors, de-inlining bit manipulation functions to improve clang build success, and rewriting i32 and i64 binary operators to use unsigned types to avoid potential undefined behavior. Additionally, the user implemented the ability to allocate user stack space at link time, enhancing flexibility for specific test cases. The changes primarily targeted the `src` directory, indicating direct involvement in core compiler and optimization logic.
compilersemscriptenc-plus-pluswebassemblytoolchain
emscripten-core/emsdk
Jun 2020 - Jan 2023
Emscripten SDK
Role in this project:DevOps Engineer
DevOps EngineerContributions:97 reviews, 31 commits, 115 PRs in 2 years 7 months
Contributions summary:Derek primarily focused on automating and streamlining the release process for the Emscripten SDK. Their contributions include updating the Node.js version used in the build process, updating the Bazel build system for new Emscripten releases, and implementing a GitHub Actions workflow for creating release pull requests. These changes involved modifying build scripts, updating dependency information, and configuring CI/CD pipelines. The work significantly automated release management and improved the efficiency of the build process.
javascripttypescriptemscriptensdk
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