Jeremy Burge bundles into a coffee shop for a lunch break in between meetings on a hot, dry afternoon in Silicon Valley.

We're 12,600 kilometres from Melbourne, where he grew up, and 8600 kilometres from London, where he now lives, but right in the epicentre of the global tech boom that has brought him here for a week and has, in one of the most unusual and delightful ways, provided him with a living.

Down the road in Mountain View, a town that would be unremarkably suburban were it not the home of Google, Burge has been busy with quarterly meetings for the Unicode Technical Committee, part of the Unicode Consortium, a not-for-profit group of developers, coders and typographers who code alphabets so they appear the same across all digital systems.

In recent years, a subcommittee has taken on the role of creating and encoding emojis and Burge has spent the week debating new proposals and settling on three characters to add to a provisional list of candidates: a Hindu temple emoji, a diya (an oil lamp used in India and Nepal) and a snorkel mask.

Dressed in cargo shorts and sandals, the 33-year-old grins a lot. He's endlessly enthusiastic; equally as excited by the new vomiting face emoji as he is by the fact he somehow turned a casual curiosity with emoji into a six-figure salary, unwittingly becoming the world authority on those smiling poos and cats with hearts for eyes.

He joked in a recent interview that his partner, a nurse, was not "hesitant to remind me that she saves lives as a nurse, and I describe pictures on the internet - and possibly make more money doing so".

It is, he says, an "insane" job. "It's fun, it's something I never would have assumed I'd be doing."

Burge became a member of Unicode's Emoji Subcommittee after creating Emojipedia, an online database of everything emoji-related that had 23 million page views in October and turned into a career for Burge almost overnight.

The Deakin University graduate was working as a consultant for Australian universities and helping them improve their websites for students when he started Emojipedia as a pet project in 2013.

He blames it on his obsession with little details and a tendency to examine and question efficiency - whether it be the way a university's website services its students or the way his local coffee shop processes its order.

"I like the details of things, that interests me, which annoys my fiancee to no end," he says. "When emojis came out, I saw them on the phone and then there was an update with some new ones and I thought, 'why these ones?' I Googled it and couldn't find anything [so] I dug into it and tried to come up with a list of which ones were new."

He created a basic site that catalogued each emoji, each new update, which emojis had been adopted by vendors like Apple and Gmail and the way they were presented slightly differently across devices.

For a while, no one cared, he admits. Then, one day in 2014 when he was on holidays in Spain, the site exploded.

"I'd published the list of new draft candidates which had been on Unicode's site for a couple of months but Unicode is a standards body, the target audience isn't the public, so it was probably a bit hard to find.

"Someone found the list on my site and ... then every website in the world suddenly went 'Wait, we can know which new emojis are going to come out? You mean to tell me there's a list of them?' They lost their collective minds and the whole site crashed."

Ads on the site bring in a six-figure sum and, while Burge declines to say how much, it was enough to quit work in 2015. It also opened the door to Unicode membership, allowing him to have a say on future emojis.

Before the spike, Burge thinks people were unaware there was a transparent, democratic process behind emoji creation. Unicode, made up of members like Apple and Microsoft and independent emoji advocates like Burge, accepts proposals for new emojis from members of the public. Proposals are approved if they meet criteria including high potential usage and distinctiveness.

"Until then, I think there was a collective understanding of 'We just thought the list [of emojis] was done'," he says. "Maybe it caught Unicode by surprise."

The explosion was not quite a surprise to Burge. He knew emojis would be popular - although perhaps not so much so that they would become a cult-like digital language. Emojis were used in about 2.3 trillion mobile messages last year and have spawned merchandise, a movie - and the emoji keyboard is on more mobile phones than any language keyboard worldwide. 

But Burge is being polite when he says that Unicode may have been caught by surprise.  In fact, the popularity of emojis sparked a minor civil war among the group of web developers and typographers.

Emails between Unicode members, published by BuzzFeed, show that some were angry that the apparent obsession with emoji might be jeopardising the important work of encoding minority languages. Irritated that his proposal to code a medieval punctuation mark had been sidelined, one Unicode contributor complained that the committee had "lost the plot".

"Emoji, emoji, emoji. It's all about emoji," he wrote. "What does it take to get your attention, folks? An April Fools' proposal for EMOJI PUNCTUS EXCLAMATIVUS MARK?"

For more than 20 years, Unicode has only encoded characters if it can be proven that they have appeared in published works.

"The hard part is that emoji follows different rules," Burge says. "Emoji opens the gates and says this doesn't exist, there's nothing we have in the past, we just think it should exist. For a very small group of people who are just really into the tradition of how those standards have worked, it might be confronting."

The conflict hits at the heart of a grander tussle over whether emoji is a valid language, one that is being created with the world's input.

Decisions made by Burge and his fellow emoji overlords in Silicon Valley have sparked heated debates about religious, political, cultural and gendered messages inherent in the emojis that are - or are not - created.

A red hair emoji is one of the most frequently requested. Photo: Emojipedia

Unicode has been accused of being a group of old, white men with blind spots for the potential impact of, for example, not  including any women's shoe emojis that are not high-heeled; having a narrow set of international foods and religious symbols; or not representing all hair colours.

Burge has pursued a gender neutrality strategy, recognising that the selection of characters can reinforce stereotypes of, say, males as firefighters or women as dancers. He has also pushed for a red-hair emoji, one of the most common requests from Emojipedia users who tend to use Burge as their touch point for complaints and demands.

"The giraffe is the one people request the most," he said. "For some reason, people are wild about the giraffe."

Long term, the goal is to make everything customisable by skin colour, hair colour and gender. But Burge takes a practical line down the middle, saying decisions should be guided by data on potential usage.

"The hardest part is trying to figure out that if you add something, are you opening the floodgate," he says. "No one wants thousands of new emojis every year."

For now, he's not saving lives but he's happy to be documenting the strange and fascinating evolution of a digital language.

"I like the intersection of all these things; humanity, geopolitics, technical implementation," he said. "And when else do you get an opportunity to have an insane job like this?"