João Saffran
Software Engineer II Microsoft, DirectX Shader Compiler Team
Greater Vancouver Metropolitan Area Canada
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolJoão S is a compiler-focused software engineer and lecturer based in Abbotsford, Canada, with three years of industry experience and an academic MSc in Computer Science. He contributes to the LLVM project, implementing HLSL features and DXIL/SPIR-V lowering—work that surfaces in one of the most prominent open-source compiler toolchains. At Microsoft he splits time between Clang HLSL support and platform engineering for payroll systems, demonstrating fluency across low-level compiler internals and cloud-backed application stacks. Former roles at Cyral and as an MSc researcher show a strong background in high-performance Go services, ETL/Big Data pipelines, and automated compiler transformations for privacy compliance. He blends practical production experience with research rigor, and unusually for a compiler engineer also ships full-stack features in React, C#, and Azure.
3 years of coding experience
3 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Science, Computer Science, Bachelor of Science, Computer Science at PUC MinasM.S. Computer Science, Computer Science, M.S. Computer Science, Computer Science at Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais
Github Skills (9)
spirv10
hlsl10
dx10
dxc10
compiler-development10
shader9
llvm9
cprogramming-language9
c-language9
Programming languages (7)
Github contributions (5)
llvm/llvm-project
Jul 2024 - May 2026
The LLVM Project is a collection of modular and reusable compiler and toolchain technologies.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:360 reviews, 131 PRs, 133 pushes in 1 year 10 months
Contributions summary:João primarily focused on implementing and enhancing HLSL (High-Level Shading Language) features within the LLVM project's compiler toolchain. Their work involved adding new HLSL functions like `asuint`, `asfloat`, and `splitdouble`, alongside their corresponding DXIL (DirectX Intermediate Language) and SPIRV (Standard Portable Intermediate Representation) lowering implementations. Furthermore, they contributed to the implementation of the `clip` function and added support for `bufferUpdateCounter` including fixing signature and debugging information generation for HLSL RWBuffer types. The user's contributions are concentrated on improving the HLSL compiler's capabilities.
compilerllvmtoolchain
joaosaffran/llvm-project
Sep 2024 - May 2026
The LLVM Project is a collection of modular and reusable compiler and toolchain technologies.
Contributions:2 PRs, 850 pushes, 142 branches in 1 year 8 months
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