Kevin Schaaf - Software Engineer at Google

Kevin Schaaf

Software Engineer at Google

San Francisco, California, United States

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Summary

🤩

Rockstar

🎓

Top School

Kevin Schaaf is a software engineer with 14 years of experience building web platforms and embedded electronics, currently working on the future of the web at Google from San Francisco. He has led cross-disciplinary teams and product efforts at companies like LG, HP/Palm, and Bose, shipping consumer devices and a widely used JavaScript framework (Enyo) for cross-platform apps and webOS. Kevin is an active front-end open-source contributor, improving polyfills and performance in prominent projects such as Lit and the Web Components libraries, including practical fixes for IE11 and test infrastructure enhancements. Fluent in Japanese, he routinely bridges engineering and product teams across Japan, the US, and Europe—often taking on roles that require both technical depth and cross-cultural communication. A techie at heart, he prototypes web and mobile ideas on the side and has a track record of optimizing browser rendering and testing workflows that quietly improve developer and user experiences.

14 years of coding experience

11 years of employment as a software developer

MBA, MBA at INSEAD

Valedictorian, 4.0/4.0, Valedictorian, 4.0/4.0 at Indian Creek High School

BS, Computer Engineering, BS, Computer Engineering at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology

English, Japanese, Chinese

Stackoverflow

Stats

96reputation

2kreached

3answers

0questions

Github Skills (22)

javascript10

testing10

polymer10

typescript10

web-components10

html-template10

lit10

polyfills10

performance-optimization10

typescript-types10

html10

internet-explorer10

typescripts10

selenium9

saucelabs9

Programming languages (5)

TypeScriptBikeshedJavaScriptHTMLMarkdown

Github contributions (5)

lit/lit

Sep 2018 - Jan 2023

Lit is a simple library for building fast, lightweight web components.

Role in this project:

Front-end Developer

Contributions:14 releases, 1026 reviews, 137 commits in 4 years 5 months

Contributions summary:Kevin primarily focused on improving the performance of the `repeat` directive and incorporating it into various benchmarks. Their work involved refactoring the directive's logic, including key-to-DOM mapping and efficient updates. Furthermore, the user updated benchmarks to include the `repeat` directive, demonstrating their work was centered on optimizing the performance of Lit web components. They also contributed to pre-release documentation.

litlit-elementweb-componentsjavascriptwebcomponents

lit/lit.dev

Feb 2021 - Jan 2023

The Lit website

Role in this project:

Front-end Developer

Contributions:94 reviews, 28 commits, 15 PRs in 1 year 10 months

Contributions summary:Kevin primarily contributed to the Lit website, focusing on updates to built-in directives, and adding runnable code samples. They implemented examples for various Lit directives, including `repeat`, `ifDefined`, `classMap`, `ref`, `styleMap`, `guard`, `live`, and `cache`. The user also addressed code compilation issues in TypeScript samples and introduced new tutorial content.

litlit-elementlit-html

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