# Lydia Schiff

> Software Engineer @ Snap Inc.

Location: San Francisco, California, United States
Profile: https://flows.cv/lydiaschiff

- Tech Lead with 12 years of industry experience and software running on hundreds of millions of devices.
- Experienced library implementer for android and cross-platform, photo/video editing, ads, and real-time rendering
- Strengths: Projects with multiple languages, getting difficult things to work well on bad phones, being nice.

Languages and technologies:
Expert-ish:     Kotlin, Android, JNI, JVM concurrency, 3D LUTs
Experienced: Typescript, C++, Java, OpenGL, Android NDK, MediaCodec
Ok-at:             Swift, Obj-C, C, WebRTC, React Native

Hobbies: 
- Heavy machinery operator, carpenter, and artist contributor to large collaborative art pieces like the Temple at Burning Man
- Record collector and (sometimes) DJ for ~18 years
- Bubble bath, manga, and video game enjoyer

Academic interests:
- Medium-serious amateur logician interested in programming language theory
- Homotopy type theory • dependently-typed programming • automated theorem proving • ethics of machine consciousness • philosophy of mathematics

## Work Experience
### Software Engineer (L5) @ Snap Inc.
Jan 2024 – Present | San Francisco, California, United States
- Tech Lead and Mobile Engineer on the Monetization team. 
- Focused on new ad products for small and medium-sized companies. 
- I work on cross-platform mobile ad rendering and performance. Typescript, Kotlin, and some Swift.

### Senior Software Engineer - Native Engineering, Core A/V @ Discord
Jan 2020 – Jan 2023 | San Francisco, California, United States
- Native Engineering is a small team of senior C++ engineers responsible for client-side voice and video chat and streaming at Discord.
- The team supports Windows, Mac, Linux, Android, iOS, Xbox, and PS5.
- I was the team's Android expert and main engineer and owner for Android audio/video performance at Discord.
- I designed and implemented Discord's video rendering library for Android which has 100+ million users.
- Responsibilities: real-time rendering • encoding/decoding • camera • screen-sharing • audio routing • bluetooth • A/V sync • RTC networking • bandwidth estimation, many simultaneous participants

### Senior Software Engineer - Android Creative Tools, Visual R&D @ VSCO®
Jan 2017 – Jan 2020 | Oakland, CA
- Worked with both the R&D and mobile teams implementing creative tools for Android.
- Image scientists would have a cool idea; I would get it to work well on bad phones.
- Architected, implemented, and maintained VSCO's real-time photo and video-processing framework for Android, affectionally known as 'The Stack'. It was implemented in Java, Kotlin and C++, using OpenGL for compute and rendering, and MediaCodec for video coding, editing, and playback.

- Responsibilities: photo and video editing • real-time rendering • video color-grading • physical emulation of analog film • sophisticated manipulation and compression of 3D lookup-tables • HSL and clarity tools • multi-dimensional interpolation

### Software Engineer - Android Creative Tools @ VSCO®
Jan 2014 – Jan 2017 | Oakland, CA
- Worked on photo and video tools for VSCO on Android, designing and implementing most of the color-grading and editing pipeline, adding support for full resolution photo and video with accurate emulation of analog films.

- Awards: Best Photography App of 2015 by Google Play  =^_^=

### Research Programmer @ Space Science and Engineering Center, University of Wisconsin–Madison
Jan 2013 – Jan 2013 | Madison, Wisconsin
- High-Performance Computing group at Space Sciences.
- Implemented GPU acceleration for climate modeling software, porting parts of the WRF (Weather Research & Forecasting) model from Fortran/OpenMP to C/CUDA.


## Education
### Bachelor of Science (BS) in Computer Science
University of Wisconsin-Madison

### Certificate in Mathematics
University of Wisconsin-Madison

### Participant in Oregon Programming Languages Summer School
University of Oregon


## Contact & Social
- LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/lydia-schiff
- GitHub: https://github.com/lydia-schiff

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Source: https://flows.cv/lydiaschiff
JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/lydiaschiff/resume.json
Last updated: 2026-03-30