Bazel Leaders

The engineers who built Bazel, and still do

Fifteen people at EngFlow helped create Bazel at Google or maintain the rules and tools the Bazel ecosystem runs on. Helen Altshuler co-created BazelCon. EngFlow hosts the Build Meetup series (meetup.build) and contributes to Bazel, rules_go, Gazelle, rules_proto, rules_cc, rules_kotlin, and the Bazel remote execution client.

Built Bazel at Google

Nine members of the EngFlow team worked on Bazel, or on Blaze, its predecessor, at Google.

Ulf Adams

Co-CTO, Co-Founder

Led Bazel development and open-sourcing

Ulf led the development and open-sourcing of Bazel and was in charge of Bazel and Blaze at Google for eleven years, as an engineer and then as a manager. He is a long-term contributor to Bazel’s remote execution code and one of three community code owners for Bazel’s remote execution module.

Luis Fernando Pino Duque

Co-CTO

Bazel external APIs and macOS support

Luis spent five years on the Bazel team at Google, where he developed Bazel’s external APIs and its macOS support.

Helen Altshuler

CEO, Co-Founder

Bazel enterprise adoption; co-created BazelCon

Helen led enterprise customer onboarding to Bazel at Google and co-created BazelCon, the annual conference for the Bazel community.

László Csomor

Founding Engineer

Led Bazel on Windows

László worked on the development and open-sourcing of Bazel during nine years at Google and led the Bazel-on-Windows team, the work that made Bazel a cross-platform build system.

Han-Wen Nienhuys

Software Engineer

Proposed open-sourcing Bazel

Han-Wen worked on developer tools at Google and wrote the original proposal to open-source Bazel. He also wrote LilyPond, Zoekt, and go-fuse.

John Cater

Software Engineer

Platforms and toolchains

John has been a core Bazel contributor since 2016 and led the work to update Bazel for multi-platform builds: the platforms and toolchains model that cross-compiling Bazel projects use. He has presented that work at BazelCon.

William Saakyan

Software Engineer

Local execution and performance

William was an engineer on the Bazel team at Google, where he led local execution and performance improvements.

Nicolas Lopez

Developer Support Engineer

Remote execution

Nicolas spent four years on Bazel remote execution at Google. He maintained bazel-toolchains, rules_docker, and rules_k8s, and helped the TensorFlow and Android projects move to remote execution.

Mike Bland

Developer Experience Platform Architect

Blaze and remote execution adoption

At Google, Mike led the Testing Grouplet and drove the initial internal adoption of Blaze and remote execution, the operating pattern Bazel later made available outside Google.

Maintain the rules and tools the ecosystem runs on

Six members of the team built or maintain projects in the bazelbuild and bazel-contrib organizations.

Jay Conrod

Software Engineer

rules_go and Gazelle

Jay led the development of rules_go and Gazelle, the Go rules for Bazel and the BUILD file generator used across the Bazel ecosystem.

Yannic Bonenberger

Software Engineer

rules_proto

Yannic has contributed to Bazel since 2017. He initiated bazelbuild/rules_proto and co-maintains it.

Armando Montanez

Software Engineer

rules_cc

Armando is the author of the modular, rule-based toolchain API in rules_cc and a co-maintainer of rules_cc. He is a founding member of Pigweed, Google’s embedded development platform, which builds with Bazel.

Corbin McNeely -Smith

Software Engineer

rules_kotlin

Corbin co-maintains rules_kotlin and is a code owner of the project. He has also contributed to Bazel’s Android support, after thirteen years in developer tooling at Google and Block.

Benjamin Peterson

Software Engineer

Bazel contributor; Go and Python rules

Benjamin migrated Dropbox to Bazel and wrote the company’s Bazel rules for Go and Python. He contributes to Bazel and to CPython.

Tomasz Pasternak

Software Engineer

Bazel IntelliJ plugin

Tomasz is a former maintainer of the Bazel IntelliJ plugin, the JetBrains IDE integration for Bazel, from his time at JetBrains via VirtusLab.

And CMake

Damien Buhl

Co-Founder, tipi.build by EngFlow

Damien leads CMake RE, EngFlow’s remote execution and caching product for CMake, which he created at tipi.build together with HermeticFetchContent. He is a contributor to the Boost C++ Libraries and a member of the ISO C++ Standards Committee, and has led Yocto and CMake migration projects at IoT and financial companies.

Why it matters

Knowing Bazel’s internals is what lets EngFlow diagnose a misconfigured rule that silently breaks builds across an organization, or size a cluster before June saturates what was provisioned in January. Assembling infrastructure is not the same as operating it.

Want to hear from the people who build Bazel?