Elton Gao
Software Engineer - IOS, Build System, CI at Square
Old Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolElton Gao is a senior software engineer with 14 years of experience specializing in iOS, build systems, and CI, currently optimizing large-scale mobile development infrastructure at Square. He blends hands-on mobile development with platform-level tooling to speed up CI/CD and testing pipelines for iOS teams. Previously he led ads delivery and growth efforts at Wattpad, shipping product features, testing architectures, and dev tools that turned multi-day processes into hour-scale workflows. An active contributor to CocoaPods, he has deep familiarity with Swift integration, prebuilt frameworks, and installer edge cases that improve build reliability across the Apple ecosystem. Comfortable switching between individual contributor work and team leadership, he pairs a Waterloo software engineering background with practical lessons from rapid prototyping and failed product experiments. Based in Toronto, he brings a pragmatic focus on developer velocity and measurable operational improvements.
14 years of coding experience
7 years of employment as a software developer
Exchange student - CS, Exchange student - CS at National University of SingaporeHwa Chong InstitutionBachelor of Software Engineering Software Engineering, Bachelor of Software Engineering Software Engineering at University of Waterloo
Github Skills (9)
dependency-manager10
package-manager-tool10
swift10
ios10
package-manager10
cocoapods10
build-system9
objective-c8
git4
Programming languages (11)
Github contributions (5)
CocoaPods/CocoaPods
Sep 2020 - Feb 2022
The Cocoa Dependency Manager.
Role in this project:
iOS Mobile Developer
iOS Mobile DeveloperContributions:6 reviews, 9 commits, 7 PRs in 1 year 5 months
Contributions summary:Elton primarily focused on improving the CocoaPods library, a dependency manager for iOS and macOS projects. Their commits involved addressing Swift-related aspects, specifically handling the `swift_versions` attribute and prebuilt frameworks. The contributions demonstrate a good understanding of build processes and target configurations within CocoaPods, impacting how Swift code is detected and integrated into projects. Further, the user addressed a post install issue in the installer.
cocoapodsobjective-cpackage-managermacdependency-manager
marcsantiago/ortb-twofive
Mar 2019 - Feb 2021
openrtb data structures
Contributions:2 PRs, 9 comments in 1 year 11 months
data-structuresopenrtb
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