Meet the Team
Bill Hoffman
Chief Technical Officer
Business Development
Company Leadership
Open Source Software Technology Program
Software and Data Solutions
Systems Administration
Kitware New York
Clifton Park, NY
Service at Kitware
M.S. in Computer Science
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI)
B.S. in Computer Science
University of Central Florida
Bill Hoffman is a founder of Kitware and serves as its Chief Technical Officer and Chairman of the Board. He is the original author and lead architect of CMake, one of the most widely used build systems for C and C++, and continues to guide its development as Kitware maintains it for the global developer community.
Organizations turn to Bill and the Kitware team when their software becomes difficult to build, maintain, or extend. Kitware helps them accelerate delivery, reduce technical risk, and adapt their software as their needs change. Bill has led these efforts for startups, Fortune 500 companies, government agencies, and national laboratories. Because Kitware’s engineers create and maintain the open source tools many of these organizations already rely on, customers work directly with the people who know those tools best.
That expertise extends across Kitware’s platforms. Bill has been a major technical contributor to the Visualization Toolkit (VTK), the Insight Toolkit (ITK), and ParaView. By building on these established platforms, customers can focus their investment on the capabilities that distinguish their products while retaining control of their own code and technology roadmap. Kitware supports customers building both open source and proprietary applications.
As CTO, Bill sets engineering standards across Kitware’s work in AI, computer vision, scientific visualization, healthcare, and software and data solutions. His focus is on software that remains reliable, maintainable, and useful well beyond its initial delivery. He regularly speaks at CppCon and C++Now, sharing practical guidance on CMake, build systems, and modern C++ development.
Before founding Kitware, Bill spent nine years in the Computer Vision Group at GE Corporate Research and Development. He holds a B.S. in Computer Science from the University of Central Florida and an M.S. from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, where he has also taught graduate courses.
Publications
- K. Martin and B. Hoffman, Mastering CMake: a cross-platform build system. Kitware Inc, 2015.
- K. Martin, B. Hoffman, and A. Cedilnik, Mastering CMake: a cross-platform build system, 6. ed. Kitware, 2013.
- M. Hanwell, A. Perera, W. Turner, P. O'Leary, K. Osterdahl, B. Hoffman, and W. Schroeder, "Sustainable Software Ecosystems for Open Science," in Workshop on Sustainable Software: Practices and Experiences, 2013. [URL]
- B. Davis and B. Hoffman, "Issue RADAR Using Git/Master/Mantis," Kitware Source, 2011.
- B. King and W. Hoffman, "Distributed version control: The future of history," Kitware Source, no. 15, 2010.
- K. Martin, B. Hoffman, and A. Cedilnik, Mastering CMake: a cross-platform build system, 4. ed. Kitware, 2008.
- K. Martin and B. Hoffman, "An Open Source Approach to Developing Software in a Small Organization," IEEE Software, vol. 24, no. 1, pp. 46-53, Jan. 2007. [URL]
- W. Schroeder, L. Avila, K. Martin, W. Hoffman, and C. Law, The VTK User's Guide. Kitware, 2006.
- W. Hoffman and K. Martin, "The CMake build manager," Doctor Dobbs Journal, vol. 28, pp. 40-46, Jan. 2003. [URL]
- K. Martin, W. Hoffman, and B. Geveci, "Creating Libraries for Multiple Programming Languages," Dr. Dobb's Journal, 2002.
- W. Schroeder, L. Avila, and W. Hoffman, "Visualizing with VTK: A tutorial," IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, vol. 20, no. 5, pp. 20-27, Oct. 2000. [URL]
- W. Hoffman and R. Curwen, "Pseudo-incremental linking for c/c++," Dr. Dobb's Journal, 1999.
- C. Rothwell, J. Mundy, and B. Hoffman, "Representing objects using topology," in Object Representation in Computer Vision II. Springer Berlin Heidelberg, 1996, pp. 79-108. [URL]
- C. Rothwell, J. Mundy, W. Hoffman, and V. Nguyen, "Driving vision by topology," in Proceedings of International Symposium on Computer Vision, 1995. [URL]
- J. Mundy, C. Huang, J. Liu, W. Hoffman, D. Forsyth, C. Rothwell, A. Zisserman, S. Utcke, and O. Bournez, "MORSE: A 3D Object Recognition System Based on Geometric Invariants," in Proceedings of the ARPA Image Understanding Workshop, 1994.
