Victor Costan
Staff Software Engineer at Google
San Francisco, California, United States
Summary
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Rockstar🎓
Top School
Top expert inModern C++ Development and Cross-Platform Computing
Victor Costan is a hands-on Staff Software Engineer and tech lead with 18 years of experience building and shipping low-level systems, currently leading Fuchsia’s Display and Input Drivers team at Google from San Francisco. He combines deep hardware understanding with software engineering best practices—redesigning display stacks, reverse-engineering missing hardware docs, and driving multi-vendor display and touch bring-ups. Previously he led Chrome storage and Web Platform efforts, shipping major features and growing teams while keeping exceptionally high people-manager scores. An active open-source contributor, he has optimized core libraries like Snappy, LevelDB and crc32c and helped harden GoogleTest and Homebrew formulae, demonstrating a pragmatic focus on performance and portability. His background blends PhD-level research on trusted computing with practical product engineering and hiring/mentorship experience.
18 years of coding experience
17 years of employment as a software developer
Master of Business Administration (MBA), Business Administration and Management, General, Master of Business Administration (MBA), Business Administration and Management, General at Quantic School of Business and TechnologyDoctor of Philosophy (PhD), Computer Science, Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Computer Science at Massachusetts Institute of TechnologyBachelor of Science (B.S.), Management Science, Bachelor of Science (B.S.), Management Science at MIT Sloan School of Management
Romanian, English, Chinese
Stackoverflow
6,874reputation
1.4mreached
26answers
1question
javascript
top-5%
multithreading
top-1%
Github Skills (85)
deco10
programming-language10
facebook-api10
package-management10
python10
multithreading10
testing10
test-framework10
cmake10
ruby10
ffi10
indexeddb10
code-cleanup10
activerecord10
compression10
Programming languages (19)
Github contributions (5)
google/snappy
Mar 2017 - Jan 2023
A fast compressor/decompressor
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:6 releases, 16 reviews, 105 commits in 5 years 11 months
Contributions summary:Victor primarily focused on optimizing and refactoring the codebase, improving the Snappy library's internal functionality. They removed unnecessary `using namespace std;` declarations and cleaned up warnings related to unused functions. Furthermore, the user made modifications related to build configurations and header file includes, and they optimized bit manipulation routines in the stubs, leading to performance improvements. Their work involved improvements in several areas, including memory management, compression, and decompression.
decompressorcompressioncompressorsnappy
google/leveldb
Aug 2017 - Jul 2022
LevelDB is a fast key-value storage library written at Google that provides an ordered mapping from string keys to string values.
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:40 reviews, 150 commits, 127 PRs in 4 years 11 months
Contributions summary:Victor's contributions primarily revolved around optimizing and enhancing the LevelDB key-value storage library. They implemented support for the Intel crc32 instruction (SSE 4.2) to improve performance, resulting in significant speed increases for crc32c operations. Additionally, the user fixed compilation warnings and addressed issues related to file handling, particularly regarding the handling of missing manifest files and the behavior of sync operations on Apple systems. They also added metrics around database usage.
to-stringstringkeysleveldbmapping
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