This is the personal site of Rob Shearer, a software engineer, manager, and researcher.

Work

From 2016 to 2019 I worked as an engineering manager at Google, in charge of client-side tooling for the full range of Google Cloud products.

Before Google, I owned Bloomberg’s primary data distribution libraries—i.e. the C, C++, Java, .NET, and Python libraries that both internal applications (including the Bloomberg terminal) and enterprise customers used to publish and consume real-time financial data. I also designed the wire protocols for these services, co-owned Bloomberg’s C++ coding standards, and worked with John Lakos on Bloomberg’s core C++ library development, advanced developer training, and the next version of his component-based software development methodology

Prior to that I spent a few years researching knowledge representation and automated reasoning, and designed some new techniques for efficiently solving asymptotically intractable reasoning problems. I received my doctorate from the University of Oxford in 2010.

I’ve also worked for a handful of small startups in the US and UK focused on technologies ranging from web content management to natural language processing to automated reasoning (which led to my research work) to lightweight high-performance distibuted computation. None of them became household names.

A more detailed CV is available.

Personal

I’m a dual US/UK national who grew up in Rhode Island but spent my twenties in the UK (Cambridge, London, Manchester, and Oxford), with a brief stay in southern California (and an even briefer one in Buenos Aires). I currently live in New York City.

For a little while I was the Common Room President at Oxford’s Linacre College, which was a surprisingly formative experience to have come so late in life. Long before, during my limited time as an undergraduate at Brown University, I co-founded Technology House, Brown’s first and only technology-focused residential society (i.e. a co-ed frat for those interested in science and engineering).

I try to stay physically active, although my only formal sporting efforts were as a member (and for one season squad leader) of the Oxford University Athletics Club, where I displayed a shocking lack of talent in events ranging from hurdles to pole vault to discus. But I gave it a hell of a try.

I like dogs, motorcycles, and mountains, in increasing order of the risk each has presented to my survival.