Seth Madison is a seasoned software engineer and engineering leader with 12 years of experience building high-engagement client applications and streaming systems. He led Philo’s frontend engineering team, shipping cross-platform apps across six platforms and helping drive billions of minutes watched and tens of millions of installs. Seth combines product-minded UX focus with deep systems work—his open-source contributions to Shaka Player and Apollo Kotlin improved streaming reliability, live playback handling, and WebSocket/subscription robustness. Now at Google working on Gemini Live on XR, he continues to tackle cutting-edge media and real-time challenges at scale. Based in San Francisco with a background in economics and environmental studies, he brings both analytical rigor and a user-centric perspective to platform and client engineering. Colleagues know him for turning subtle playback edge cases into reliable production behavior.
12 years of coding experience
6 years of employment as a software developer
BA Economics and Environmental Studies, BA Economics and Environmental Studies at Macalester College
:rocket: A strongly-typed, caching GraphQL client for the JVM, Android, and Kotlin multiplatform.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Contributions:18 reviews, 4 commits, 10 PRs in 4 years 3 months
Contributions summary:Seth primarily focused on bug fixes and improvements to the subscription management and WebSocket handling within the Apollo Kotlin client. Their contributions addressed race conditions and concurrent modification exceptions, enhancing the stability of the subscription manager. They also implemented changes to support more flexible WebSocket connections, and added features for response-based code generation with JS export. Furthermore, the user addressed issues in the JS WebSocket implementation to handle error events, which improves the robustness of the system.
JavaScript player library / DASH & HLS client / MSE-EME player
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Contributions:7 commits, 19 PRs, 62 comments in 9 months
Contributions summary:Seth primarily contributed to the Shaka Player's core functionality by implementing features related to playback and manifest parsing. Their work included enabling setting the playback start time for live streams and modifying the handling of segment references in DASH manifests, particularly for live and in-progress VOD content. Furthermore, the user improved scrubbing functionality and addressed issues related to text cues and gap jumping, enhancing the overall playback experience. These changes demonstrate a focus on improving the reliability and robustness of the player's streaming capabilities.
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