William Pearson
Software Engineer at Meta
Seattle, Washington, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolWilliam Pearson is a senior software engineer with 15 years of experience building reliable backend systems and owning features end-to-end, now based in Seattle and currently at Meta after a multi-year tenure at Microsoft. He has deep hands-on experience in system-level Python work and DevOps—contributing meaningful enhancements to Microsoft's Azure Linux Guest Agent, including upgrade orchestration and unit tests. His open-source work spans core tooling like the TOML Python library and contributions to privacy-focused projects such as Diaspora, showing comfort with both infrastructure and product-facing code. William’s background includes internships at Google and Amazon and a Computer Engineering degree from the University of Ottawa, reflecting a steady progression through high-scale engineering environments. Notably, he blends production-grade backend logic with a strong emphasis on code quality and maintainability, often tackling subtle parsing and integration edge cases.
16 years of coding experience
8 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Applied Science (B.A.Sc.), Computer Engineering, Bachelor of Applied Science (B.A.Sc.), Computer Engineering at University of Ottawa
Github Skills (29)
unit-testing10
ruby-rails10
github10
python10
testing10
text-manipulation10
linux10
rails10
microsoft-azure10
toml10
ruby10
parsing10
azure10
text-parsing10
api-design9
Programming languages (10)
Github contributions (5)
uiri/toml
Feb 2013 - Oct 2020
Python lib for TOML
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:2 reviews, 248 commits, 110 PRs in 7 years 9 months
Contributions summary:William primarily contributed to the development of the `toml` library, a Python library for parsing and emitting TOML files. Their contributions involved implementing the initial parsing logic, supporting the parsing and handling of various data types such as dates, booleans, integers, and strings. They also addressed several bugs related to newline characters, escaped characters, and handling of whitespace. The user extended functionality to include support for dumping Python objects into TOML format, including support for nested structures like arrays and tables.
python-libtoml
Azure/WALinuxAgent
Sep 2017 - Aug 2018
Microsoft Azure Linux Guest Agent
Role in this project:Back-end Developer & DevOps Engineer
Back-end Developer & DevOps EngineerContributions:26 commits, 18 PRs, 70 comments in 11 months
Contributions summary:William primarily focused on enhancing the Azure Linux Agent with features related to extension rolling upgrades. They implemented logic to manage upgrade processes, including parsing configuration, saving and comparing GUIDs, and reporting status updates. The changes involved modifications to core Python files, suggesting a focus on back-end logic and system-level operations within the agent. Furthermore, unit tests were added for this new feature, indicating a strong commitment to code quality.
linuxmicrosoft-azure
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