Henry Cai - Senior Staff Engineer at Slack

Henry Cai

Senior Staff Engineer at Slack

Palo Alto, California, United States

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Summary

🤩

Rockstar

🎓

Top School

Henry Cai is a Senior Staff Engineer based in Palo Alto with 11 years of experience building large-scale data streaming, ingestion, and SaaS platforms. He leads Slack’s Data Streaming Team after driving real-time logging and Kafka persistence at Pinterest and redesigning LinkedIn’s big data ingestion framework. A hands-on architect and manager, he specializes in ETL, Hadoop, Apache Kafka, metadata-driven persistence models, and multi-tenant SaaS customization. He has practical open-source impact—contributions to Maxwell (MySQL-to-Kafka GTID support) and Secor (hourly S3 partitioning) that solve real production recovery and partitioning challenges. Comfortable moving between low-level replication details and high-level platform design, he combines rigorous engineering with product-minded delivery. His background spans enterprise SaaS at Ariba to cloud-native messaging and streaming, reflecting both depth and breadth in data infrastructure.

11 years of coding experience

21 years of employment as a software developer

Bachelor of Science (B.Sc.) Computer Science, Bachelor of Science (B.Sc.) Computer Science at Fudan University

Master of Science - MS Computer Science, Master of Science - MS Computer Science at McGill University

Github Skills (16)

aws-s310

javas10

kafka10

gtid10

amazon-s310

replication10

database-design10

binlog10

mysql10

java10

s3-bucket10

testing10

zookeeper9

shell8

script8

Programming languages (5)

JavaScalaJavaScriptGoPython

Github contributions (5)

pinterest/secor

Jul 2015 - May 2022

Secor is a service implementing Kafka log persistence

Role in this project:

Back-end Developer

Contributions:11 reviews, 1516 commits, 1548 PRs in 6 years 10 months

Contributions summary:Henry primarily contributed to the `secor` project, focusing on the Kafka log persistence service. They added support for hourly S3 data ingestion, modifying the code to partition data files in S3 using hourly folders. This involved changes to the configuration parameters to trigger hourly partitions and adjustments to the Hive partition registration code. They also made improvements to the testing scripts, including fixes related to local S3 setup and the finalizer tests.

sinkloggingopensearchkafka-connectkafka

zendesk/maxwell

Jan 2017 - Feb 2017

Maxwell's daemon, a mysql-to-json kafka producer

Role in this project:

Back-end Developer / Database Engineer

Contributions:11 commits, 1 PR, 46 comments in 18 days

Contributions summary:Henry primarily contributed to implementing MySQL GTID support within the Maxwell daemon, a MySQL-to-Kafka producer. Their work involved adding a `gtid_set` column to the `positions` table for tracking executed GTIDs and integrating with the shyiko's binlog connector. The changes also included modifications to the `BinlogPosition` and `BinlogConnectorReplicator` classes to handle GTID-based binlog positions and ensure proper recovery and failover scenarios within the replication process. Furthermore, they added schema restoration support and related integration tests for the gtid mode.

to-jsonavrosinkmysqldaemon

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