Joel Leitch
Technical Lead at Stealth Startup
California, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolJoel Leitch is a seasoned technical lead and system architect with 17+ years of experience designing and operating scalable, low-maintenance systems that handle high user-facing traffic. He has driven large projects at Google across Shopping and Payments—owning signal collection, review systems, merchant insights, and in-app payments—and later led platform efforts as Senior Staff at Coupang before joining a stealth startup. Joel blends hands-on full-stack engineering with team leadership, having briefly managed a team and routinely acted as technical lead across complex, cross-product initiatives. He is an active contributor to core open-source tooling, with substantive backend fixes and refactors to the widely used google/gson library that improved parsing, type-adapter behavior, and serialization correctness. Based in California and trained at the University of Waterloo, he favors data-driven decisions and pragmatic architectures that scale.
18 years of coding experience
21 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor’s Degree, Computer Science, Bachelor’s Degree, Computer Science at University of Waterloo
Github Skills (9)
testing10
json10
deserialization10
javas10
data-serialization10
java10
serialization10
refactoring9
unit-testing9
Programming languages (1)
Github contributions (3)
google/gson
May 2018 - May 2018
A Java serialization/deserialization library to convert Java Objects into JSON and back
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:1 commit, 1 PR, 1 push in 1 day
Contributions summary:Joel's commits primarily focused on testing, fixing, and refactoring core features of the Gson library. Their work involved exposing and addressing bugs related to custom type adapters, pretty printing of JSON, and deserialization of numbers and booleans. The user made significant contributions to restructuring primitive type serialization and deserialization, demonstrating a deep understanding of the library's internals. These changes were crucial for refining Gson's parsing, handling of special types and string escaping capabilities.
deserializationjavaserialization
CyanogenMod/android_external_gson
Sep 2008 - May 2013
Contributions:207 commits in 4 years 8 months
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