Steven Dao
Software Engineer at DoorDash
Austin, Texas, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolSteven Dao is a software engineer with 12 years of experience building artist-facing tools and infrastructure, currently working at DoorDash Labs after a multi-year stint developing level-editing tools at Retro Studios. He spent five years at Pixar creating Maya plugins, USD integrations, and interactive set-dressing applications that improved modeling, rigging, and production workflows across multiple films. His background spans production graphics, game tooling, and accessibility work at Google—giving him a rare blend of C++/Python plugin development, pipeline engineering, and user-centered design. Notably, he contributed to the OpenUSD project by improving Maya-USD interoperability, handling UV/primvar edge cases and camera export fidelity for large-studio pipelines. Based in Austin, he pairs deep domain knowledge of content-creation pipelines with pragmatic engineering for robust, artist-friendly tools.
12 years of coding experience
11 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Arts - BA, Computer Science, Bachelor of Arts - BA, Computer Science at The University of Texas at Austin
English, French
Github Skills (15)
maya10
c-language10
maya-api10
cprogramming-language10
plugin10
usd10
data-integration9
integrations9
cloud-integration9
system-integration9
enterprise-integration9
application-integration9
api9
integrate9
apim9
Programming languages (6)
Github contributions (5)
PixarAnimationStudios/OpenUSD
Sep 2016 - Aug 2020
Universal Scene Description
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:144 commits, 4 comments in 3 years 11 months
Contributions summary:Steven contributed to the Universal Scene Description (USD) project, specifically focusing on integrating USD features with Maya. Their work involved implementing workarounds for Maya crashes related to UV set management and implementing a mechanism for storing USD-specific data in Maya attributes. They also added functionality for handling custom attributes, primvars, and the correct export of camera information, and they performed improvements to the handling of model hierarchy for instancing. Their work likely involved C++ and the development of plugins for the Maya software.
universal-scene-descriptionscene
sdao/sdao.github.io
Jan 2015 - Jun 2024
Contributions:143 pushes in 9 years 6 months
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