Yu-wen Lai
Software Engineer at Apple
Seattle, Washington, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolYu-wen Lai is a Seattle-based software engineer with 10 years of experience specializing in distributed systems, back-end development, and data engineering. He currently works at Apple after several roles at Cloudera where he made notable contributions to widely used Apache projects like Hive and Impala—improving metastore and query processing, compaction APIs, and performance-critical serialization paths. His physics background (BS/MS from National Taiwan University) and an MS in Computer Science from NYU (3.85/4.0) give him a rigorous, quantitative approach to designing reliable, high-throughput pipelines. Previously he built compute clusters for neoantigen prediction and scaled real-time data platforms to millions of records per minute, demonstrating both hands-on systems engineering and production deployment skills. He also translated "Mastering Apache Spark 2.x" into Chinese, reflecting strong technical communication across disciplines.
10 years of coding experience
5 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor's degree, Physics, Bachelor's degree, Physics at National Taiwan UniversityMaster's degree, Computer Science, 3.85/4.0, Master's degree, Computer Science, 3.85/4.0 at New York University
Github Skills (18)
metastore10
back-end-development10
big-data10
java10
javas10
sql10
apache-hive10
imp10
impala10
hadoop9
admin9
database-administration9
databases9
database9
c-language8
Programming languages (11)
Github contributions (5)
apache/hive
Jun 2020 - Aug 2022
Apache Hive
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:63 reviews, 22 commits, 48 PRs in 2 years 2 months
Contributions summary:Yu-wen primarily contributed to the core functionalities of Apache Hive, focusing on enhancements to the metastore and query processing components. They implemented features such as skipping the trash during external table data deletion and providing a new HMS API to return the latest committed compaction record for a given table. Furthermore, the user addressed performance bottlenecks by optimizing the serialization and deserialization of bitvectors and reducing overhead in column statistics merging. They also added support for skipping SSL cert verification for downloading JWKS.
flinksqlapachebig-dataspark
apache/impala
May 2021 - Sep 2022
Apache Impala
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:12 commits in 1 year 4 months
Contributions summary:Yu-wen primarily contributed to the back-end development of the Apache Impala project. Their work involved the addition and modification of classes related to write ID management, crucial for transactional table refreshing and file metadata handling. The user also implemented changes to the MetastoreServiceHandler and updated the Impala configuration for build processes. Moreover, the user focused on integrating HMS APIs to get the latest compaction records for transactional tables and improve overall system performance.
apache-impalaparquetolapsqlapache
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