Roozbeh Pournader
Vice Chair, Script Encoding Working Group at Unicode Consortium
San Francisco Bay Area United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolRoozbeh Pournader is a veteran internationalization and text-rendering engineer with 19 years of experience, currently serving as Vice Chair of the Unicode Script Encoding Working Group in the San Francisco Bay Area. He combines standards leadership at the Unicode Consortium with hands-on contributions to major open-source projects—everything from HarfBuzz and the Flutter engine to Android support libraries and the widely used fontTools and Roboto font family. His work focuses on the subtle, low-level problems of text shaping, locale-aware rendering, and font interoperability, including adding new OpenType language tags and improving cmap and loca handling. Former engineering lead roles at WhatsApp and Google underline his ability to scale solutions in production systems, while long-term formal representation at Unicode highlights deep protocol and standards expertise. Notably, he blends standards advocacy with practical fixes that improve stability across platforms, a rare combination that keeps global text working reliably for billions of users.
19 years of coding experience
16 years of employment as a software developer
Mathematics and Physics, Mathematics and Physics at Allameh Helli schoolMofid High SchoolComputer Software Engineering, Computer Software Engineering at Sharif University of Technology
Persian, English, Arabic
Github Skills (36)
debug10
opentype10
c-language10
fonts10
python10
testing10
text-manipulation10
android-sdk10
fonttools10
java10
compiler-options10
javas10
font-face10
linker10
cplus10
Programming languages (12)
Github contributions (5)
googlefonts/roboto-2
Jun 2014 - May 2015
The Roboto family of fonts
Role in this project:
Full-stack Developer
Full-stack DeveloperContributions:148 commits, 2 PRs, 2 pushes in 11 months
Contributions summary:Roozbeh contributed to the development and maintenance of the Roboto font family. Their work included making the build process compatible with Windows, adding scripts for post-production touch-ups and Android-specific processing, and implementing a test infrastructure for validating font metrics. They also addressed digit widths and added tests for the web build.
fontfonts
aosp-mirror/platform_frameworks_support
May 2015 - Jan 2017
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:28 commits in 1 year 8 months
Contributions summary:Roozbeh primarily focused on bug fixes and code enhancements within the support library for the Android platform. Their contributions involved modifying the `BidiFormatter` class to handle null input strings and merging changes related to the `unicodeWrap()` function, leading to improved stability. They also contributed to the `RenderScript` and `AnimatedVectorDrawableCompat` components of the framework, demonstrating a focus on core platform functionality and rendering. The user's work improved the reliability of the support libraries.
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