Jonathan Behrens
Senior Software Engineer at Microsoft
Bellevue, Washington, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolJonathan Behrens is a Senior Software Engineer with 17 years of experience, currently at Microsoft in Bellevue, Washington, and a deep background in systems and backend engineering from a PhD in Computer Science at MIT. He is an active open-source contributor in the Rust ecosystem, with notable work on widely used projects like image-rs, wgpu, naga, and rustfmt, improving image codecs, shader translation, and graphics APIs. His contributions show a blend of systems-level thinking and careful API design—e.g., reworking image decoders to handle large images, adding 64-bit shader support, and removing unsafe code from PNG decoding. Jonathan has a track record of optimizing dataflow and caching systems (contributions to Noria and ReadySet) and enjoys tackling performance, correctness, and maintainability in low-level code. He combines academic rigor with production experience from internships at Google and Microsoft, and a flawless CS degree from Cornell, making him particularly strong at bridging research-grade ideas into robust, deployable systems. An understated but telling detail: he maintains critical image tooling personally, reflecting long-term stewardship rather than one-off fixes.
17 years of coding experience
Master's degree, Computer Science, Master's degree, Computer Science at Massachusetts Institute of TechnologyHigh School, High School at Orange High SchoolBachelor’s Degree, Computer Science, 4.0, Bachelor’s Degree, Computer Science, 4.0 at Cornell University
Github Skills (49)
algorithm10
spirv10
code-optimization10
caching10
algorithms10
vulkan10
dataflow-programming10
shader10
dataflow10
compilation10
translation10
back-end-development10
image-processing10
glsl10
shaderc10
Programming languages (20)
Github contributions (5)
image-rs/image
Jan 2018 - Jan 2023
Encoding and decoding images in Rust
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & System Architect
Back-end Developer & System ArchitectContributions:414 reviews, 187 commits, 487 PRs in 5 years 1 month
Contributions summary:Jonathan made significant contributions to the `image-rs/image` repository, focusing on enhancing the TIFF image format decoder. Their work involved integrating the `lzw` crate for improved compression, restructuring the `ImageDecoder` trait for supporting large images, and implementing the `read_rect` function for decoding specific image regions. Furthermore, the user addressed various bugs within the codebase, showcasing a commitment to code quality and maintainability.
rustdecoding-imagespixel
image-rs/image-png
Jan 2019 - Jan 2023
PNG decoding and encoding library in pure Rust
Role in this project:Backend Developer
Backend DeveloperContributions:133 reviews, 54 commits, 190 PRs in 4 years 1 month
Contributions summary:Jonathan primarily focused on improving the `image-rs/image-png` library by refactoring and optimizing the PNG decoding process. Their contributions include removing instances of unsafe code, enhancing the performance of the filtering algorithms, and improving the efficiency of the adaptive filtering. Additionally, the user added functionality to read header information and implemented a corpus-bench example.
pngrust
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