Welcome

I'm a Part-time Undergraduate (PTUG) Software Developer at Arm, where I've contributed to open-source projects like Cranelift and ArmRAL. For more on my professional history and some of the work I've done, take a look at my experience.

Some of my open-source personal projects are available below.

I prioritise efficiency and robustness in a technical solution, but I also believe that engineers have a social obligation to consider the potential impact or ramifications of their work; to this end, I endeavour to be mindful of how any of my work could be detrimental, even unintentionally. I'm also very supportive of work around diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) - both out of personal interests and owing to the potential benefits that engineering projects can gain from diversity of opinions and perspectives.

I hold a Student Membership with both the Institute of Engineering and Technology (IET) and British Computing Society (BCS).

Projects

Experience

Part-time Undergraduate Software

Arm Limited (2021 - present):

  • Significantly improved opcode support for the Cranelift interpreter - especially for SIMD - providing benefit in testing for all architectures.
  • Ported many opcodes in the Cranelift AArch64 lowering backend from Rust to ISLE, accelerating the pace of this endeavour while improving some suboptimal existing lowerings in the process.
  • Improved performance of specific routines and implemented some new, desired ones in the Arm RAN Acceleration Library 23.07.
  • Contributed to libamath to improve performance, and implement additional variants of some routines utilising newer architectural features (such as SVE) for even better performance. Multiple improvements included in this work were upstreamed into Arm Optimized Routines.
Tooling used includes Git (GitHub / GitLab / Gerrit), ReviewBoard, Jenkins, and Ubuntu Linux for development. Primary languages for this work include Rust, C, and C++.

Open-source work on GitHub

Education

MEng Computer Science (with a year in industry)

University of York (2020 - 2025):

First-class Honours, with a successful year in industry at Arm.

Relevant optional modules include high-performance parallel & distributed computing (HPC); networking; and embedded systems design & implementation (including FPGA development using Xilinx Vivado and an FPGA board with an Arm processor).

Interesting / valuable optional modules (albeit less directly-relevant) include quantum computation, and human factors (in particular focussing on risk assessment & management, and industrial ethics).

My Honours project revolved around attempting to leverage graphs in order to assess the differences between binaries built using different compiler configurations.


GCE Advanced Levels ('A Levels')

Cardinal Newman College (2018 - 2020):

  • Computer Science: A*
  • Mathematics: A*
  • Further Mathematics: A*
  • Physics: A*
Awarded the Reading List Foundation Scholarship after completion (nominated by all subjects).

Get in touch

See the top of this page for links to my socials.
Email: max@mheaton.dev