Helena Kotas
Senior Software Engineer at Microsoft
Redmond, Washington, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolHelena Kotas is a Senior Software Engineer with nine years of professional experience based in Redmond, Washington, currently contributing to Xbox Graphics on Microsoft’s Shader Compiler team. She brings deep compiler and back-end expertise, notably enhancing HLSL and DirectX shader compilation within LLVM and the DirectXShaderCompiler projects—work that touches widely used, high-profile toolchains. Her earlier career includes impactful performance and parser engineering for the .NET Framework’s System.Xml, where she redesigned core components for significant speedups and compatibility. Helena’s background blends low-level code generation, resource binding and type handling with practical performance optimization, reflecting both systems-level rigor and product-focused delivery. Trained at Charles University in Prague, she pairs formal computer science foundations with a history of shipping robust, security-conscious tools such as encrypted virtual disks and clinical software early in her career.
9 years of coding experience
10 years of employment as a software developer
High School, Mathematics, High School, Mathematics at Gymnázium Brno, třída Kapitána JarošeMaster’s Degree, Faculty of Mathematics and Physics - Computer Science, Master’s Degree, Faculty of Mathematics and Physics - Computer Science at Charles University in Prague
English, Czech, Slovak
Github Skills (8)
hlsl10
c-language10
dx10
cprogramming-language10
dxc10
compiler-development10
llvm10
directx9
Programming languages (6)
Github contributions (5)
microsoft/DirectXShaderCompiler
Mar 2018 - Jan 2023
This repo hosts the source for the DirectX Shader Compiler which is based on LLVM/Clang.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & Compiler Engineer
Back-end Developer & Compiler EngineerContributions:9 releases, 322 reviews, 228 commits in 4 years 11 months
Contributions summary:Helena primarily contributed to the DirectX Shader Compiler project by fixing compiler issues related to shader code generation. Their work involved resolving bugs in handling anonymous structures within constant buffers, addressing issues with vector and matrix binary operations and type conversions, and implementing warnings for implicit truncation of vector types. They also incorporated improvements in the code base, such as supporting default matrix types in templates.
directx-shader-compilercppclangbgfxhosts
llvm/llvm-project
Feb 2024 - Apr 2025
The LLVM Project is a collection of modular and reusable compiler and toolchain technologies.
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:407 reviews, 147 PRs, 76 pushes in 1 year 1 month
Contributions summary:Helena primarily contributed to the HLSL compiler within the LLVM project, implementing features and making changes related to HLSL resource handling, including type traits, constant buffer handling, and resource binding. They added support for `__hlsl_resource_t`, implemented attributes for resource classes (`resource_class`), and built functionality for `AppendStructuredBuffer` and `ConsumeStructuredBuffer`. Additionally, the user worked on constant buffer layout structs and associated codegen.
compilerstechnologiesclangsubmittoolchain
Find and Hire Top DevelopersWe’ve analyzed the programming source code of over 60 million software developers on GitHub and scored them by 50,000 skills. Sign-up on Prog,AI to search for software developers.