David Zhu - Co-founder & CTO at Kato

David Zhu

Co-founder & CTO at Kato

San Francisco, California, United States

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Summary

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Senior

🎓

Top School

David Zhu is a San Francisco–based engineer and founder with eight years of experience building cloud-native infrastructure and storage systems, currently serving as Co-founder & CTO of Kato. He combines hands-on backend and DevOps expertise—demonstrated by substantive contributions to Kubernetes CSI projects like external-provisioner, external-attacher, and the GCE PD driver—with leadership experience as an engineering manager at Brex and senior engineering roles at Google. David has a knack for improving robustness and migration paths in distributed storage, often tackling tricky edge cases around mounts, capacity handling, and volume lifecycle. He also strengthens quality through test-framework work and mocks for CSI compatibility, showing a disciplined approach to reliability and automation. A Carnegie Mellon CS graduate with a high academic record, he pairs deep systems knowledge with startup grit, having shipped Micro-SaaS projects and bootstrapped product work between leadership roles. Notably, his open-source footprint focuses on pragmatic fixes that prevent real-world outages rather than flashy features, reflecting a preference for durable engineering.

8 years of coding experience

7 years of employment as a software developer

Bachelor of Science (BS), Computer Science, 3.83/4.0, Bachelor of Science (BS), Computer Science, 3.83/4.0 at Carnegie Mellon University

High School Diploma, 4.0/4.0, High School Diploma, 4.0/4.0 at Singapore American School

English, Chinese

Github Skills (29)

kubernetes10

filesystem10

volumes10

mount10

testing10

storage10

go-testing10

file-operations10

gcp10

go10

fileio10

kubernetes-pods10

golang10

management10

error-handling10

Programming languages (10)

HCLShellCSSMakefileJavaScriptGoHTMLJupyter Notebook

Github contributions (5)

kubernetes-sigs/gcp-compute-persistent-disk-csi-driver

Jun 2018 - Mar 2020

The Google Compute Engine Persistent Disk (GCE PD) Container Storage Interface (CSI) Storage Plugin.

Role in this project:

Back-end & DevOps Engineer

Contributions:11 releases, 241 commits, 216 PRs in 1 year 9 months

Contributions summary:David's contributions center around implementing and maintaining the Google Compute Engine Persistent Disk (GCE PD) Container Storage Interface (CSI) Driver. Key actions include initial code pushes, adding features, resolving build errors, and streamlining deployment. The user also focused on updating dependencies, integrating with test frameworks, and optimizing deployment scripts, demonstrating expertise in both back-end development and DevOps practices.

gcpcompute-enginegoogle-compute-enginestorage-plugindisk

kubernetes-csi/external-provisioner

Mar 2018 - Feb 2020

Sidecar container that watches Kubernetes PersistentVolumeClaim objects and triggers CreateVolume/DeleteVolume against a CSI endpoint

Role in this project:

Back-end Developer

Contributions:2 releases, 30 commits, 20 PRs in 2 years

Contributions summary:David primarily focused on bug fixes and improvements to the external provisioner for Kubernetes CSI, specifically addressing issues with capacity handling and volume naming. They enhanced the code by making storage representations more readable and changing the default volume name behavior. The user also implemented new features, such as adding reserved parameter keys and fixing issues related to migration, demonstrating a deep understanding of the CSI interface and Kubernetes storage concepts.

sidecark8s-sig-storagesidecar-containerpersistentvolumeclaimwatches

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