Emma Pilkington
Compiler Engineer at AMD
Old Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Summary
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Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolEmma Pilkington is a compiler engineer with 11 years of experience building and debugging production compiler toolchains, currently contributing to AMD’s compiler stack. She has deep LLVM and Clang expertise—especially in the AMDGPU backend and Clang front end—having fixed debug-info/trap handling bugs, improved disassembly diagnostics, and implemented C++ language and Objective-C++ features. Her work spans NN compiler development for NPUs as well as low-level demangling and objectsize/runtime evaluation contributions to Swift/LLVM, showing fluency across both traditional and ML-focused compilers. Known for pragmatic bug fixes that enable better tooling and debuggability, she combines systems-level rigor with an ability to prototype language and ABI features. Based in Old Toronto, she brings a track record of impactful open-source contributions to the LLVM project alongside industry experience at Apple, Synopsys, and AMD.
11 years of coding experience
5 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Computing, Computer Science, Bachelor of Computing, Computer Science at Queen's University
Github Skills (29)
objective-c10
container10
c-language10
template-metaprogramming10
llvm10
compiler-development10
machine-code10
stl10
code-generation10
compiler-design10
semantic-analysis10
obj10
amdgpu10
clangd10
cprogramming-language10
Programming languages (7)
Github contributions (5)
apple/swift-clang
Feb 2017 - Sep 2019
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:58 commits, 39 pushes in 2 years 7 months
Contributions summary:Emma primarily worked on enhancing the clang compiler, specifically focusing on Objective-C code generation and semantic analysis. Their contributions included implementing support for the `@available` attribute within the code generation phase, allowing for version-specific code. They also addressed bugs related to unguarded availability warnings, fixed issues in the Sema module and added features for controlling static destructor registration. The user's work primarily involved modifications to C++ source code files within the compiler infrastructure.
llvm/llvm-project
Nov 2019 - May 2025
The LLVM Project is a collection of modular and reusable compiler and toolchain technologies.
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:32 reviews, 35 PRs, 56 pushes in 5 years 7 months
Contributions summary:Emma primarily contributes to the AMDGPU backend of the LLVM compiler project. Their work involves fixing bugs in the debug information generation and trap handling, and also improving disassembler diagnostics for kernel descriptors. They have made changes to the code related to the s_trap intrinsic, and also worked on the implementation of specific GPU features. These contributions improve the functionality and debugging capabilities of the AMDGPU compiler.
compilerllvmtoolchain
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