[1] After his PhD in computer science, Lattner worked at Apple for 12 years, eventually leading the Developer Tools team.

[3] He is currently co-founder and CEO of Modular AI, a company building an artificial intelligence developer platform.

While working with Vikram Adve, he designed and began implementing LLVM, an innovative infrastructure for optimizing compilers, which was the subject of his 2002 Master of Science thesis.

[8] In his PhD thesis, completed in 2005 also with Vikram Adve, Lattner used LLVM for research on optimizing pointer-intensive programs.

[14] Lattner's work involved designing, implementing, and evangelizing the LLVM and Clang compilers, productizing and driving the debugger LLDB, and overseeing development of the low-level toolchain.

[22] Swift is designed to coexist[23] with Objective-C, the object-oriented programming language formerly preferred by Apple, and to be more resilient against erroneous code.

[26][27] Lattner served as the Senior Director and Distinguished Engineer, TensorFlow Infrastructure and Technologies at Google from August 2017 to January 2020.