Jacob Viau
Principal Software Engineer at Microsoft
Seattle, Washington, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolJacob Viau is a Principal Software Engineer based in Seattle with 11 years of experience specializing in SDK and backend design for durable, long-running workflows. At Microsoft since 2015 he has been a deep contributor to DurableTask and the Azure Functions durable extension, resolving tricky serialization, middleware, and out-of-process worker issues to improve reliability and compatibility. His work touches both runtime internals and developer experience—authoring durable function templates and integrating Durable SDK updates across Azure services. Jacob also contributes to core .NET tooling and threading libraries, often focusing on robustness through testing, project reload resilience, and thread-safety refinements. Known for pragmatic problem-solving, he combines systems-level thinking with meticulous test and automation work that uncovers subtle concurrency and deserialization bugs.
11 years of coding experience
Bachelor of Engineering - BE, Computer Software Engineering, Bachelor of Engineering - BE, Computer Software Engineering at University of Alberta
Github Skills (25)
unit-testing10
azure-storage10
multithreading10
testing10
net10
azure-functions10
dotnet10
durable-functions10
netframework10
asp-net10
csproj10
thread10
hyper-threading10
dotnet-core10
azure-service-bus10
Programming languages (13)
Github contributions (5)
Azure/durabletask
Dec 2020 - Nov 2022
Durable Task Framework allows users to write long running persistent workflows in C# using the async/await capabilities.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:1 release, 233 reviews, 5 commits in 1 year 11 months
Contributions summary:Jacob contributed to the Durable Task Framework by implementing features, fixing bugs, and improving its integration with Azure Storage and Service Bus. Their work included adding support for data serialization using Data Contract JSON Converter, enhancing task activity dispatching, and resolving a Service Bus dependency issue. These contributions likely improved the framework's functionality, reliability, and compatibility with other Azure services.
async-awaitdurablecsharplongpersistent
microsoft/vs-threading
Aug 2015 - Jul 2018
The Microsoft.VisualStudio.Threading is a xplat library that provides many threading and synchronization primitives used in Visual Studio and other applications.
Role in this project:QA Engineer / Test Automation Engineer
QA Engineer / Test Automation EngineerContributions:21 commits, 2 PRs, 13 comments in 2 years 11 months
Contributions summary:Jacob primarily focused on testing aspects within the `microsoft/vs-threading` repository. Their commits centered around modifying and enhancing test logic, including the validation of log entries within the `DelegatingJoinableTaskFactoryTests.cs` file. These changes involved introducing null checks, style adjustments, and refactoring locking mechanisms to improve the robustness and reliability of the tests. The user also introduced and modified the test timeout configurations.
visual-studiovisualstudiodotnetxplatnetstandard
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.