# Phoebe Goldman

> Software engineer

Location: New York, New York, United States
Profile: https://flows.cv/phoebegoldman

I'm excited about computers, mostly. I summarize my interests as being in programming language runtimes, but in my mind that's a cop-out because PL runtimes include all the cool problems: memory management (ranging from tracing garbage collection to database page stores), JIT compilation and optimization, object representation (ask me about NaN-boxing), eager versus lazy evaluation strategies, and more!

I'm an AI realist, which is different from an AI skeptic: I believe that AI, incl. generative AI, is a powerful tool, but I'm also wary of overstating its utility for consumers today and in the immediate future.

My undergraduate degree is in Dramatic Literature from NYU's College of Arts and Sciences. It's like an English major, if you focused on theater as literature. Some schools might call this dramaturgy. I chose this, on purpose, several years after deciding to devote my life to computer science and/or software engineering. I would love to elaborate on my reasoning, but the gist of it is that I was already a competent programmer and algebraist, and I felt that my undergraduate education would be best spent improving my command over language and complex thought. Plus I had a lot of fun reading, writing and talking about classical Greek and contemporary German theater.

My turn-ons include metaprogramming, highly expressive type theories, compiler optimizations which have worse than O(nlogn) runtime in the size of the input program and the Oxford comma. My turn-offs include complicated syntax, Undefined Behavior and poor documentation.

## Work Experience
### Software Engineer @ Clockwork Labs
Jan 2023 – Present
Designing and implementing components of SpacetimeDB, the real-time WASM stored procedure database! Among my many design triumphs have been collaborating on our in-memory row format, wholly designing our on-disk snapshot format, and spearheading the cross-language stabilization of our user-facing APIs. I also maintain our Rust client SDK, which involves a lot of cool compiler-adjacent code generation problems, and is stress-tested by its internal use in our managed cloud service.

### Software Engineer @ Clockwork Labs
Jan 2023 – Present

### Research Intern @ HRL Laboratories, LLC
Jan 2022 – Jan 2022 | Malibu, California, United States
Designed, prototyped in Common Lisp and Coalton, and evaluated techniques for compiling and optimizing quantum programs targeting silicon-­dot QPUs. Implemented abstractions in the Coalton compiler and standard library to support coworkers’ development.

### Research Intern @ SIFT (Smart Information Flow Technologies)
Jan 2018 – Jan 2022 | Minneapolis, Minnesota
Designed, prototyped in Common Lisp, and evaluated AI planning and plan recognition engines. Maintained and extended CUDA software for simulating swarm reasoning. Manipulated ARM32 embedded devices at a low level as a testbed for cybersecurity research.

### Research Intern @ Adventium Labs, a Galois company
Jan 2016 – Jan 2018 | Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States
Developed Windows Forms GUIs with C# .NET to monitor and manage a secure hypervisor. Wrote and generated formal models to demonstrate and test a model­-checking framework. Automated test infrastructure.


## Education
### Bachelor's degree in Computer Science
New York University
Jan 2018 – Jan 2022


## Contact & Social
- LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/phoebe-goldman-aa4a72188

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Source: https://flows.cv/phoebegoldman
JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/phoebegoldman/resume.json
Last updated: 2026-03-20