Hou Hou
Director, Head Of Software at The Apache Software Foundation
San Francisco Bay Area United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolHou Hou is a seasoned software leader with 15 years of experience building reliable, scalable systems and currently serves as Director and Head of Software at Neuralink in the San Francisco Bay Area. He blends hands-on engineering—particularly in Rust, backend systems, and CI/CD—with platform leadership honed through senior roles at Scribd, LinkedIn, and as a founding engineer at FloydHub. An active open-source contributor and Apache PMC/committer across projects like Apache Arrow, DataFusion, Delta Lake, and Airflow, he has shipped low-level improvements (parquet/CSV readers, error handling) and higher-level platform tooling for observability and deployments. His contributions range from C-level control events in Tor to UI and documentation work for LinkedIn projects, showing a rare mix of systems programming, QA, DevOps, and technical writing. He holds an MS in Computer and Information Systems Security from Carnegie Mellon and often focuses on making complex data pipelines and storage systems more robust and maintainable. Quietly pragmatic, he favors modular refactors and test-driven enhancements that reduce operational surprise in production.
15 years of coding experience
8 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Science (B.S.) Computational Science, Bachelor of Science (B.S.) Computational Science at Sun Yat-sen UniversityMaster of Science (M.S.) Computer and Information Systems Security/Information Assurance, Master of Science (M.S.) Computer and Information Systems Security/Information Assurance at Carnegie Mellon University
Chinese, English
Github Skills (72)
testing10
bash10
c1110
file-format10
c1710
apache-arrow10
scheduling10
lua10
automation10
automation-testing10
file-parser10
parquet10
rest-api10
javascript10
dockers10
Programming languages (25)
Github contributions (5)
roapi/roapi
Nov 2020 - Jan 2023
Create full-fledged APIs for slowly moving datasets without writing a single line of code.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:36 releases, 127 reviews, 138 commits in 2 years 2 months
Contributions summary:Hou primarily contributed to refactoring and expanding the functionality of the `roapi/roapi` project, which focuses on creating APIs for datasets. Their work involved splitting the project into `roapi-http` and `columnq` crates, indicating an effort to modularize the codebase. They implemented support for HTTPS transport for CSV data sources and HTTP and S3 stores for parquet, demonstrating a focus on data source integration. Furthermore, the user worked on supporting multiple partitions.
pythonarrowin-memory-databasequery-frontendscolumnar
delta-io/delta-rs
Apr 2020 - Jan 2023
A native Rust library for Delta Lake, with bindings into Python
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:15 releases, 683 reviews, 46 commits in 2 years 8 months
Contributions summary:Hou primarily contributed to the implementation of error handling and refactoring within the `delta-rs` library, which provides a native Rust implementation for Delta Lake. They reimplemented the library's error types using `thiserror`, improving the clarity and maintainability of error handling. The commits also included changes to storage and table loading methods, which indicates involvement in core data access and management functionalities. Additionally, the user refactored the storage module and implemented changes to support time travel functionality.
lakedatabricksdeltapythonrust-library
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