Paul Thomson

United Kingdom

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Summary

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Top School

Paul Thomson is a computer science researcher and senior software engineer with 14 years’ experience specializing in systematic concurrency testing and reproducibility of elusive “heisenbugs.” He holds a DPhil from Imperial College London and has blended academic research with production engineering at Microsoft, contributing to critical Azure host-agent services as well as multiple Microsoft Research labs. An active open-source contributor, he has improved core tooling in well-known projects like Google’s GAPID graphics debugger and KhronosGroup’s SPIRV-Tools, adding reduction passes and test automation to strengthen robustness. Paul’s work sits at the intersection of low-level systems, automated testing, and developer tooling—skills that help both uncover subtle concurrency faults and harden complex production stacks.

14 years of coding experience

1 year of employment as a software developer

Master of Science (MSc), Computer Science, Distinction, Master of Science (MSc), Computer Science, Distinction at University of Oxford

Bachelor of Science (BSc), Computer Science, First class with honours., Bachelor of Science (BSc), Computer Science, First class with honours. at University of Southampton

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Computer Science, Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Computer Science at Imperial College London

Github Skills (23)

c-language10

testing10

go10

build-automation10

golang10

cprogramming-language10

test-automation10

data-structure9

debug9

command-line-interface9

algorithm9

debugging9

algorithms9

command-line9

performance-optimization9

Programming languages (9)

C#PowerShellJavaC++ShellCGoGLSL

Github contributions (5)

KhronosGroup/SPIRV-Tools

Dec 2018 - Apr 2021

Role in this project:

Back-end Developer & Test Automation Engineer

Contributions:162 reviews, 25 commits, 76 PRs in 2 years 4 months

Contributions summary:Paul contributed to the `spirv-tools` repository by implementing a new reduction pass (`OperandToUndefReductionPass`). This involved adding the pass itself, refactoring code, and writing tests to ensure its functionality. Further contributions included fixing merge blocks and loop to selection reduction opportunities to check if they were still enabled, as well as adding and improving various tests for the remove unreferenced instruction pass. The user also worked on improving the reducer algorithm.

google/gapid

Oct 2018 - Apr 2020

Graphics API Debugger

Role in this project:

Back-end Developer & Automation Engineer

Contributions:15 commits, 16 PRs, 6 pushes in 1 year 6 months

Contributions summary:Paul made several contributions focused on improving the build process and enhancing the codebase for the Graphics API Debugger. Their work included refactoring code to utilize existing shader types, adding new fields to resource handling, and improving the gofuse build system. The user also worked on command-line interface (CLI) tool enhancements such as screenshot and resource dump functionalities, including capture ID support. They also improved GLES dependency graph generation.

apiopenglesreplaywindowslinux

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