In August, after many months of job hunting, I finally started a new role in the San Francisco Bay Area as a compiler engineer. It’s wild, I have dental insurance now.
What is a compiler engineer, anyway?
I imagine the audience of this post is both “people who want a job in compilers” and “people who are curious about my life”, so for those in the latter category: Wikipedia says that “a compiler is software that translates computer code written in one programming language into another language.” Basically, I’m a software engineer who works on programming languages. I don’t make programming languages—there is an entire theoretical subfield for that, and it is very cool; I implement them, which requires less math.
If you’re in the latter category, most of the technical details in this post will probably be boring and irrelevant to you, so you can skip to the end where I talk more about why I do compilers, what my life is like these days, etc.
(By the way, my debut novel from Simon & Schuster is out on November 11th. It’s a young adult romance set at a hackathon. You can preorder it here.)
Why this post exists
When preparing for compiler interviews, I discovered there was very little information online about how to break into this niche as a new or recent grad. There were plenty of YouTube videos on machine learning/full-stack/a newfangled thing called “AI Engineer”, but nobody was talking about compilers, and maybe somebody less delusional would’ve taken that as a sign to switch subfields, but alas, I happen to be delusional, so instead I fumbled around in the dark for the better part of a year and eventually landed a job.
So maybe this post can help other people who are interested in compilers. Or maybe they will read all of this and decide this is so not worth the effort, which I guess is also a way of helping them.
A little about me
In 2023, I graduated from MIT with a double major in math and computer science. Then I began a fifth-year research-based master’s degree, where I was in a compilers lab group. I dropped out after that fall, but sadly cannot claim any cool “MIT dropout” cred because it was grad school. From June to October 2024, I was a compiler engineer at a startup in New York City. In that role, I worked on extending a preexisting open-source programming language.
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