Alan Zhao
Software Engineer at Google
Mountain View, California, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolAlan Zhao is a software engineer with 11 years of experience, currently building infrastructure at Google from Mountain View. He brings deep back-end and build-system expertise demonstrated by contributions to high-profile open-source projects like Chromium and LLVM, where he fixed build crashes, adjusted compiler-related flags, and refined coroutine/codegen behavior. His background in biomedical engineering and early bioinformatics work — analyzing multi-million patient datasets and studying heart development in zebrafish — gives him unusual domain fluency at the intersection of systems engineering and life sciences. Colleagues rely on him for pragmatic fixes that improve long-term code quality and toolchain robustness.
11 years of coding experience
2 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor's Degree, Biomedical Engineering, Bachelor's Degree, Biomedical Engineering at Columbia University in the City of New York
English, Chinese
Github Skills (16)
code-generation10
compiler-design10
c-language10
coroutines10
cprogramming-language10
python10
build-automation10
llvm10
unit-test9
rust9
debug8
debugging8
testing7
build-system6
c115
Programming languages (6)
Github contributions (5)
llvm/llvm-project
May 2022 - Mar 2025
The LLVM Project is a collection of modular and reusable compiler and toolchain technologies.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:49 reviews, 40 PRs, 44 pushes in 2 years 11 months
Contributions summary:Alan's contributions primarily focused on improving the LLVM compiler infrastructure, particularly in the area of coroutines and code generation. They implemented fixes for lifetime intrinsics related to coroutine allocation, ensuring allocas were correctly placed on the coroutine frame or stack. Further work involved fixing a debug information issue with tail merging in the branch folding optimization, and adding a `returns_twice` attribute to `setjmp(3)` for correct code generation. The user also made a minor fix to an assertion in a libc test.
compilerstechnologiesclangsubmittoolchain
chromium/chromium
Sep 2022 - Jan 2023
The official GitHub mirror of the Chromium source
Role in this project:Back-end Developer & Automation Engineer
Back-end Developer & Automation EngineerContributions:6 commits in 3 months
Contributions summary:Alan primarily contributed to the Chromium project by addressing build-related issues and fixing minor code style issues such as trailing commas. One major contribution involved setting the `OPT_LEVEL` environment variable within the `run_build_script.py` script to resolve a crash caused by a rust compiler-builtins PR, demonstrating knowledge of build processes and compiler flags. Additionally, the user fixed trailing commas in various test files and other source code files, indicating familiarity with the codebase and contributing to code quality.
chromiumgithub-mirrorchrome
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