Olivier Chafik

Career

Olivier Chafik's about page describes early work doing 3D graphics and performance optimization at Cimmetry Systems, followed by three years leading a front-office development team at Sophis. From mid-2012 Chafik worked as a software engineer at Google on YouTube for iOS, Swiffy and AdSense.⁶

Chafik's GitHub profile now lists Anthropic as company, and the Model Context Protocol's maintainers file lists Chafik as one of the maintainers of the protocol's TypeScript SDK.¹²⁸

Open-source work

Chafik has published open-source libraries for interoperability and performance, including ScalaCL, which runs Scala code on graphics cards, the Scalaxy macro experiments, and Java libraries such as BridJ, JavaCL and JNAerator for calling native code and OpenCL.⁶⁷

In llama.cpp, Chafik's pull request adding Jinja chat-template support was merged on 21 January 2025. It relies on minja, a minimal C++ Jinja engine published in Google's GitHub organization, whose README notes that Chafik has since left Google. Through 2025 Chafik's commits extended llama-server's tool-call support, added streaming of tool calls and reasoning output, added options such as a reasoning budget and an offline mode, and kept the vendored minja in sync with new model templates.³⁴⁵⁹

Work and contributions

• Model Context Protocol TypeScript SDK Open-source code

  Listed as one of the TypeScript SDK maintainers in the protocol's MAINTAINERS.md (last updated October 1, 2026). The SDK's license file says the project is moving from MIT to Apache-2.0: new contributions are licensed under Apache-2.0, and earlier contributions not yet relicensed remain under MIT.²⁸

• llama.cpp chat templates and tool calling Open-source code

  Opened pull request #11016, "Add Jinja template support," merged in January 2025, which copied minja from google/minja into llama.cpp. Commits authored in 2025 fix and extend tool-call support, add streaming of tool calls and thoughts with --jinja, reasoning-format options, a --json-schema-file flag, and syncs of the vendored minja. The repository is MIT-licensed.³⁵⁹

• minja Open-source code

  A minimal C++ reimplementation of the Jinja templating engine for LLM chat templates, in Google's GitHub organization under the MIT license. Chafik's llama.cpp pull request #11016 copied minja into llama.cpp and says minja was created for that purpose; the README says it is used in llama.cpp and points readers to Chafik's fork after Chafik left Google.⁴³

Timeline

1. 2012Joined Google as a software engineer, working on YouTube for iOS, Swiffy and AdSense.⁶
2. Dec 30, 2024Opened the llama.cpp pull request adding Jinja chat-template support.³
3. Jan 21, 2025Had the Jinja template support pull request merged into llama.cpp.³
4. Feb 18, 2025Refactored the common chat and tool-call API in llama.cpp, with tests and fixes.⁵
5. May 25, 2025Added streaming of tool calls and thoughts to llama-server when Jinja templates are enabled.⁵
6. Nov 3, 2025Synced minja into llama.cpp to support GLM 4.6 and MiniMax M2 chat templates.⁵

Other documented roles

Roles the sources document that are not confirmed as current.

• Software engineer (YouTube for iOS, Swiffy, AdSense), Google⁶⁴

Where they work

• Anthropic 34 people in the wiki
• Model Context Protocol 3 people in the wiki

Related people

• Boris ChernyAlso at Anthropic
• Rahul PatilAlso at Anthropic
• Neel NandaAlso at Anthropic
• Azalia MirhoseiniAlso at Anthropic
• Kai FronsdalAlso at Anthropic
• Philipp SchmidDeveloper tools · Agents
• Aldehir RojasInference and serving · Agents
• Dane KnechtInference and serving · Agents
• Harrison ChaseAgents · Developer tools
• Den DelimarskyDeveloper tools · Agents