Daniel Xu
Member Of Technical Staff at Thinking Machines Lab
San Francisco, California, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolDaniel Xu is a systems software engineer with 12 years of experience focused on Linux kernel, eBPF, and high-performance networking. He’s contributed to flagship open-source projects including the Linux kernel, Cilium’s ebpf-go, BCC, bpftrace, and libbpf-rs, improving runtime APIs, symbol handling, and tracing language features. Daniel has held senior kernel and dataplane roles at Meta and Aviatrix and now works on low-level systems at Thinking Machines Lab, blending production-grade engineering with research-minded tooling. He’s pragmatic about performance—adding context-aware APIs and allocation-avoiding paths—and also pays attention to observability and diagnostics, from log rotation to tracepoint ergonomics. Based in San Francisco, he pairs deep C/C++ and Rust systems expertise with an open-source ethos and a fondness for untangling kernel- and userspace-level complexity.
12 years of coding experience
8 years of employment as a software developer
BS Computer Science Communication, BS Computer Science Communication at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Github Skills (46)
debugging10
debug10
c-language10
website-development10
system-programming10
tracer10
ebpf10
api-design10
testing10
libbpf10
configuration-management10
linux10
packet10
system-design10
c1110
Programming languages (19)
Github contributions (5)
libbpf/libbpf-rs
Apr 2020 - Oct 2022
Minimal and opinionated eBPF tooling for the Rust ecosystem
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:124 reviews, 288 commits, 150 PRs in 2 years 6 months
Contributions summary:Daniel primarily contributed to developing the `libbpf-rs` library, a minimal and opinionated eBPF tooling for the Rust ecosystem. Their work focused on establishing the crate structure, defining core object relationships such as programs and maps, and implementing essential APIs for interacting with BPF objects. They also added example code, implemented tests for their changes, and enhanced the documentation to improve the usability of the library.
bpfrustebpfecosystemlibbpf
facebookincubator/oomd
Jul 2018 - Sep 2021
A userspace out-of-memory killer
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:4 releases, 5 reviews, 187 commits in 3 years 2 months
Contributions summary:Daniel primarily focused on adding and modifying website and documentation files, including pages and site configuration. Their work involved copying existing documentation and setting up a basic structure for the website. Furthermore, the user implemented a functionality to reload tunables values on SIGUSR1. These contributions suggest a focus on maintaining and improving the project's website and overall structure.
memoryuserspacesecurityout-of-memorykiller
Find and Hire Top DevelopersWe’ve analyzed the programming source code of over 60 million software developers on GitHub and scored them by 50,000 skills. Sign-up on Prog,AI to search for software developers.