Faith Ekstrand
Engineering Fellow at Collabora
Austin, Texas, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolFaith Ekstrand is an Engineering Fellow and seasoned Linux 3D graphics driver developer with 13 years of experience building and maintaining core open-source graphics stacks. Based in Austin, she has been the lead developer and architect for Intel’s Linux Vulkan driver and now maintains the Intel Vulkan driver and NIR optimizing compiler within the Mesa project at Collabora. An active Khronos Group working group member, she contributes to Vulkan, SPIR-V, GLSLang and validation tooling—fixing platform-specific loader/Wayland issues and adding shader and SPIR-V features used across the ecosystem. Her background blends a PhD-level mathematical rigor with deep systems and compiler expertise, evidenced by performance-driven contributions to projects like glsl-optimizer and SPIR-V codegen. Beyond driver maintenance, she’s known for subtle, impactful fixes (UBO/layout, sRGB handling, texelFetch support) that improve real-world Vulkan demo stability and shader correctness.
13 years of coding experience
8 years of employment as a software developer
Doctor of Philosophy - PhD, Mathematics, Doctor of Philosophy - PhD, Mathematics at Iowa State University
Github Skills (30)
spirv10
vulkan10
c-language10
shader10
compilation10
apidoc10
validations10
glsl10
c1110
validation10
shaderc10
c1710
compiler-compiler10
api10
graphics-programming10
Programming languages (15)
Github contributions (5)
KhronosGroup/Vulkan-ValidationLayers
Oct 2015 - Aug 2019
Vulkan Validation Layers (VVL)
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:13 reviews, 8 commits, 7 PRs in 3 years 10 months
Contributions summary:Faith primarily contributed to the Vulkan validation layers, focusing on bug fixes, and implementing new features. Their work included addressing issues in the loader, specifically related to directory handling and Wayland support, as well as adding a warning for a specific render pass configuration. The user also contributed by adding validation for VK_KHR_pipeline_executable_properties and improving validation of float controls within the shader validation layers.
vulkanlayersvalidation
KhronosGroup/glslang
Sep 2015 - Jan 2021
Khronos-reference front end for GLSL/ESSL, partial front end for HLSL, and a SPIR-V generator.
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:10 commits, 7 PRs, 30 comments in 5 years 5 months
Contributions summary:Faith primarily contributed to the SPIR-V code generation component of the GLSLang compiler. Their work involved implementing support for new GLSL features like `texelFetch` and the `GL_EXT_shader_image_load_formatted` extension, which included modifications to the compiler's image handling logic. They also addressed issues related to matrix strides and opaque type handling. Furthermore, the user modified the intermediate representation (IR) to better align with structure sizes and alignments.
glslangvalidatorpartialesslkhronoscompiler
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