Kent Yao
Principal Software Engineer at The Apache Software Foundation
Hangzhou City, Zhejiang, China
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolKent Yao is a Principal Software Engineer with a decade of experience building secure, large-scale data systems and cloud-native ML platforms from Hangzhou. He combines deep backend and system-architecture skills—evident in significant contributions to Apache Spark, Kyuubi, and Submarine—with a security focus, having implemented SQL-standard authorization, data masking, and row-level filtering for Spark jobs. As original author and past PMC Chair of Apache Kyuubi, he led the project to Top-Level status and grew a 200+ contributor community, blending technical leadership with open-source stewardship. Kent’s background includes low-level Spark SQL optimizer and execution work from Huawei and senior engineering at NetEase, and he now brings that expertise to Microsoft. Trained as a Ph.D. in Bioinformatics, he uniquely bridges rigorous research thinking with pragmatic engineering for data-intensive platforms.
10 years of coding experience
10 years of employment as a software developer
Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) Bioinformatics, Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) Bioinformatics at Zhejiang University
Chinese, English
Stackoverflow
36reputation
677reached
3answers
0questions
Github Skills (33)
spark-sql10
authorizations10
sql-parser10
back-end-development10
architecture10
it-security10
apache-ranger10
java10
security10
scala10
javas10
system10
sql10
authorization10
architectures10
Programming languages (11)
Github contributions (5)
apache/kyuubi
Dec 2017 - Jan 2023
Apache Kyuubi is a distributed and multi-tenant gateway to provide serverless SQL on data warehouses and lakehouses.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & System Architect
Back-end Developer & System ArchitectContributions:20 releases, 3285 reviews, 906 commits in 5 years 1 month
Contributions summary:Kent's commits primarily focused on adding version information to source code, including a new file in the extra directory for supporting a specific version. Other commits focused on enhancing KyuubiServer, and implementing several related tests. The user demonstrated an understanding of the system architecture, and was responsible for adding the core API and implementing new test cases to cover functions that are missing in Kyuubi-Server.
tenantserverlessdata-lakejdbcspark-sql
apache/spark
Mar 2019 - May 2022
Apache Spark - A unified analytics engine for large-scale data processing
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:2142 reviews, 93 commits, 1294 PRs in 3 years 2 months
Contributions summary:Kent's commits primarily involve modifying code related to the Apache Spark SQL shell, focusing on features such as improving the display of information and addressing issues in the parsing of SQL queries. The user implemented enhancements in both the thrift server and the command-line interface, addressing inconsistencies in the UI and resolving potential errors related to invalid data sources and path handling. Furthermore, the user contributed to making improvements to the underlying Java libraries.
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