Behdad Esfahbod
Film Producer at Google
Edmonton, Alberta, Canada
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolBehdad Esfahbod is an Iranian-Canadian software engineer and film producer with 20 years' experience specializing in fonts, text rendering and Unicode, currently at Google while also producing documentary and narrative films. He is a core contributor and performance engineer on high-impact open-source projects such as HarfBuzz and FontTools, with deep work on CFF/GPOS shaping, glyph subsetting, and character database updates in GLib. His engineering focus combines low-level performance optimizations with build and fuzzing reliability—work that has improved font compilation, OSS-Fuzz integration, and WebAssembly/OpenGL support in Emscripten. Based in Edmonton, he pairs rigorous academic training (MSc in Computer Science and an MBA from the University of Toronto; BSc from Sharif University) with a passion for storytelling about mental health and the human condition. That unusual mix of systems-level craftsmanship and documentary sensibility helps him translate complex technical constraints into practical, human-focused solutions.
20 years of coding experience
20 years of employment as a software developer
MBA, MBA at University of Toronto - Rotman School of ManagementMSc., Computer Science, MSc., Computer Science at University of TorontoBSc, Computer Engineering, BSc, Computer Engineering at Sharif University of Technology
Stackoverflow
356reputation
9kreached
12answers
0questions
Github Skills (51)
algorithm10
glut10
optimizations10
algorithms10
javascript10
opentype10
c-language10
character-encoding10
strings10
python10
text-manipulation10
datastructure10
fonttools10
c1110
datastructures10
Programming languages (27)
Github contributions (5)
harfbuzz/harfbuzz
Nov 2005 - Jan 2023
HarfBuzz text shaping engine
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & Performance Engineer
Back-end Developer & Performance EngineerContributions:51 releases, 518 reviews, 10617 commits in 17 years 5 months
Contributions summary:Behdad focused on performance optimizations and bug fixes within the HarfBuzz text shaping engine, primarily targeting the CFF (Compact Font Format) and GPOS (Glyph Positioning) modules. Their contributions improved the efficiency of glyph subsetting operations, particularly in CFF1 and CFF2 font formats, addressing issues related to glyph ID and SID mapping, and string writing. The user also implemented various micro-optimizations aimed at speeding up key operations.
aatharfbuzzc-plus-plusfontstext-shaping
googlefonts/fontmake
Mar 2016 - Apr 2021
Compile fonts from sources (UFO, Glyphs) to binary (OpenType, TrueType).
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:10 commits, 4 PRs, 8 pushes in 5 years 1 month
Contributions summary:Behdad primarily contributed to the backend functionality of the fontmake project. Their work involved refactoring code, such as making a method a static method and optimizing performance by avoiding the recreation of objects. They also fixed critical bugs related to font compilation, specifically addressing issues with GSUB/GPOS/GDEF tables, and improved the handling of mti-sources, enhancing the project's reliability. Finally, they addressed a pip install error.
glyphsgoogle-fontsfontvariable-fontsfonts
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