Raph Levien
Principal Software Engineer at Canva
Berkeley, California, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolRaph Levien is a Principal Software Engineer based in Berkeley with 16 years of experience building low-level graphics, font, and GUI systems, currently focused on Rust-native infrastructure. He has driven research and production work at Google Fonts and Android, authored core pieces of editors and renderers in Rust (xi-editor, druid, vello) and built a font editor (Runebender) that informs his practical design sensibilities. Comfortable across the stack, he blends systems-level expertise (Android framework, libc, Cargo build work) with UI and UX craftsmanship, contributing both rendering algorithms and widget implementations. His open-source footprint includes widely used projects like pulldown-cmark and rust-lang tooling, reflecting attention to standards-compliant parsing and cross-platform compatibility. Known for pragmatic experimentation, he often prototypes new font and rendering features end-to-end—from GPU path processing to UI widgets—bringing research insights into shipping code.
16 years of coding experience
16 years of employment as a software developer
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) Computer Science, Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) Computer Science at University of California, Berkeley
English
Stackoverflow
5,158reputation
933kreached
92answers
1question
generics
top-5%
java
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regex
top-5%
Github Skills (94)
dependency-management10
parserator10
parser10
cargo10
javas10
commonmark10
cplus10
build-automation10
text-processing10
file-processing10
data-handling10
cpp10
markdown10
web-widgets10
system-programming10
Programming languages (24)
Github contributions (5)
linebender/vello
Apr 2020 - Jan 2023
A GPU compute-centric 2D renderer.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:272 reviews, 467 commits, 267 PRs in 2 years 10 months
Contributions summary:Raph primarily contributed to the development of a GPU-centric 2D renderer, "vello." Their work involved implementing a Collatz example using new traits, including modifying Vulkan-specific code, and starting the implementation of path stream processing. The contributions focus on core rendering features, and the addition of a tree-reduction prefix sum test. Furthermore, the user worked on integrating textures and supporting color emoji rendering.
gpu-programminggpurustrendereropengl
xi-editor/xi-mac
Feb 2016 - Dec 2018
The xi-editor mac frontend.
Role in this project:Full-stack Developer
Full-stack DeveloperContributions:203 commits, 67 PRs, 74 pushes in 2 years 9 months
Contributions summary:Raph primarily contributed to the development of the user interface for xi-mac, an editor frontend. Their work involved connecting the user interface to the core, implementing a custom view for the editor, and adding scrolling capabilities. They also introduced features like selection, and implemented menu items to handle file opening and saving operations.
macfrontendappkitmacoseditor
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