Rod Sheeter
Principal Engineer at Google
Mountain View, California, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolRod Sheeter is a Principal Engineer with 12+ years of experience building high-performance, scalable systems and leading large engineering organizations, currently at Google in Mountain View. He specializes in modernizing the open-source text stack and font delivery—contributing to projects like HarfBuzz, WOFF2, and Google Fonts tooling—and has driven standards work around font formats and network font delivery. Rod has a proven track record transitioning single-process systems to multi-node, multi-tenant SaaS architectures, and excels at performance tuning, concurrency, and pragmatic architectural guidance across teams of 20–200+. Equally comfortable writing low-level back-end code and automating complex build/release workflows, he pairs craftsmanship with rapid mastery of new technologies. Colleagues rely on him for tough technical questions and for delivering reliable, on-time solutions that scale globally.
12 years of coding experience
22 years of employment as a software developer
British Columbia Institute of Technology (BCIT)
English
Github Skills (38)
opentype10
c-language10
brotli10
fonts10
pytest10
python10
scripting10
testing10
text-manipulation10
emoji10
build-system10
fonttools10
c1110
file-icons10
c1710
Programming languages (18)
Github contributions (5)
google/woff2
Nov 2013 - Mar 2022
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:3 releases, 103 commits, 65 PRs in 8 years 5 months
Contributions summary:Rod primarily contributed to the core logic and functionality of the WOFF2 font format conversion library. Their work involved adding Brotli compression and decompression utilities and integrating them into the build process. Further contributions involved the optimization and normalization of font data, including the removal of the DSIG table, and supporting CFF font types. The user also addressed potential performance issues with improved range checks.
googlefonts/noto-emoji
Mar 2020 - Jan 2023
Noto Emoji fonts
Role in this project:Back-end Developer & Release Engineer
Back-end Developer & Release EngineerContributions:8 releases, 9 reviews, 164 commits in 2 years 10 months
Contributions summary:Rod primarily focused on improving the build and release process for the emoji font project. They developed and refined scripts, particularly for processing and transforming fonts. Contributions included creating utility scripts for tasks such as validating font sizes and viewboxes, generating COLRv1 fonts, and manipulating cmap entries. The user also made changes to the build system to address fontchain_lint issues.
emojinoto-emojifontsnotounicode
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