Ian Lake
Senior Software Engineer at Google
New York, New York, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolIan Lake is a Senior Software Engineer with 16 years of experience building reliable, user-facing systems and developer libraries, currently working on Google Sheets AI in New York. He has deep Android expertise—contributing to Android Jetpack, Navigation components, and popular projects like the Muzei live wallpaper—demonstrating strengths in refactoring, lifecycle correctness, and modern Kotlin idioms. His background spans low-level C++/Qt/OpenGL UI work for surgical robotics at Intuitive and production security work on Gmail’s malware and phishing defenses, reflecting versatility across mobile, desktop, and large-scale backend systems. Ian combines strong open-source credentials with pragmatic product delivery, often improving compatibility and API ergonomics while modernizing codebases. He also brings teaching experience from Carnegie Mellon, where he honed mentoring and communication skills that complement his technical leadership. A detail-oriented engineer, he pays particular attention to lifecycle and permission edge cases that meaningfully improve real-world app reliability.
16 years of coding experience
6 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor's degree, Computer Science, Bachelor's degree, Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon UniversityCrescent School
Chinese, English
Stackoverflow
195,784reputation
9.6mreached
2,575answers
8questions
styles
top-5%
localization
top-5%
google-api
top-5%
testing
top-5%
android
top-1%
dependency-injection
top-5%
Github Skills (87)
android-animation10
android-gradle-plugin10
android-intent10
navigationbar10
android-jetpack-compose10
android-jetpack10
memory-leaks10
jetpack10
permission10
push-notifications10
location10
androidmanifest10
android-lifecycle10
android-room10
image-loading10
Programming languages (2)
Github contributions (5)
muzei/muzei
Oct 2014 - Jan 2023
Muzei Live Wallpaper for Android
Role in this project:
Mobile Developer (Android)
Mobile Developer (Android)Contributions:129 releases, 14 reviews, 2647 commits in 8 years 4 months
Contributions summary:Ian focused on the implementation of the "My Photos" feature within the Muzei application, as seen through their contributions related to the gallery integration. They were responsible for modifying the existing provider and updating the UI to support the selection of a user's photos and set them as the wallpaper. They also addressed issues with permissions, ensuring that the application could access the media location on Android 13 devices. Moreover, they refactored the code by replacing usages of Picasso with Glide.
wallpaperandroidlive-wallpapermuzei
android/architecture-components-samples
Jul 2018 - Apr 2020
Samples for Android Architecture Components.
Role in this project:Mobile Developer (Android)
Mobile Developer (Android)Contributions:1 review, 123 commits, 72 PRs in 1 year 9 months
Contributions summary:Ian primarily contributed to updating and refactoring the Android Architecture Components samples. Their commits involved migrating the project to newer versions of the Navigation component, including updates to Safe Args and the Kotlin plugin for navigation. They also updated fragments and tests, refactoring code to accommodate changes in the Android framework and associated libraries. They further improved the UI tests by replacing ActivityTestRule usages with FragmentScenario.
android-architecture-componentsgeofencingarchitecture-componentsandroidkotlin
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