Jia Zhai
Co-Founder & CEO at The Apache Software Foundation
Beijing, China
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolJia Zhai is a founder and seasoned software leader with eight years of recent hands-on cloud-native and observability engineering, currently serving as Co-Founder & CEO of AscentStream. Previously Co-Founder & CTO of StreamNative and a long-time Apache PMC member (BookKeeper, Pulsar), Jia blends product leadership with deep open-source contributions to projects like Apache SkyWalking—where they improved Istio integration and CI for end-to-end APM testing. Skilled in Kubernetes, Helm, and containerization, Jia has also driven tracing and observability work in the enterprise-grade Erda platform, improving backend trace pipelines and test coverage. Based in Beijing, they pair an academic foundation from the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences with practical experience migrating large-scale distributed systems into production. Notably, their background spans both startup scaling and core infra stewardship within major Apache projects, reflecting an unusual mix of CEO-level strategy and low-level DevOps/engineering craft.
8 years of coding experience
13 years of employment as a software developer
Master of Science (MS) Computer Science, Master of Science (MS) Computer Science at University of Chinese Academy of SciencesBachelor of Science (BS) Computer Science, Bachelor of Science (BS) Computer Science at Huazhong University of Science and Technology
Stackoverflow
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Github Skills (23)
service-mesh10
kubernetes10
docker10
distributed-tracing10
dockers10
apm10
cicd10
go10
helm10
kubernetes-pods10
istio10
backend10
scripting9
observability9
unit-testing9
Programming languages (14)
Github contributions (5)
erda-project/erda
Mar 2021 - Jun 2022
An enterprise-grade Cloud-Native application platform for Kubernetes.
Role in this project:
Backend Developer
Backend DeveloperContributions:43 reviews, 194 commits, 203 PRs in 1 year 2 months
Contributions summary:Jia primarily contributed to the migration and implementation of trace-related code within the Erda platform. Their work included migrating trace-related code, adding licenses, updating dependencies for Alibaba Cloud SDK for Go, adding unit tests, and addressing variable naming issues. These changes indicate a focus on improving the platform's observability and tracing capabilities, likely involving backend logic and integration with monitoring tools.
application-platformgomicroserviceenterprise-gradedocker
apache/skywalking
Oct 2019 - Apr 2020
APM, Application Performance Monitoring System
Role in this project:DevOps Engineer
DevOps EngineerContributions:40 reviews, 4 commits, 29 PRs in 6 months
Contributions summary:Jia primarily contributed to the integration of Istio and OAP (SkyWalking's core component) within the CI pipeline, enhancing the end-to-end testing capabilities. They modified deployment scripts, specifically for Istio and demo applications, and updated configuration files to align with the new integrations. Furthermore, the user demonstrated expertise in containerization and Kubernetes by incorporating the latest tags and deploying SkyWalking using Helm charts.
skywalkingloggingobservabilitytelegrafprometheus
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