Kevin Cao
Member Of Technical Staff at Cockroach Labs
New York, New York, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolKevin Cao is a software engineer with seven years of experience building backend systems, developer tooling, and security-focused automation, currently a Member of Technical Staff at Cockroach Labs in New York. He holds a Master's in Computer Science from the University of Chicago and a BS in Software Engineering from Indiana University, where he also taught data structures and built grading and office-hour automation tools. At Cockroach Labs he contributes to CockroachDB’s backup and restore correctness and compaction features, bringing production-grade database engineering experience to distributed SQL. Previously at CertiK he led development of a VSCode extension and CI/CD and refactored internal platforms to streamline auditing workflows. Comfortable bridging product and engineering, he combines hands-on systems work with process improvements that cut backlogs and accelerate delivery.
7 years of coding experience
4 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor's degree, Computer Science - Software Engineering, Bachelor's degree, Computer Science - Software Engineering at Indiana University BloomingtonMaster's degree, Computer Science, Master's degree, Computer Science at University of Chicago
Github Skills (9)
re-store10
backup10
go10
postgresql10
distributed-database10
sql10
cockroachdb10
database-design10
testing9
Programming languages (9)
Github contributions (5)
cockroachdb/cockroach
Mar 2024 - Apr 2025
CockroachDB — the cloud native, distributed SQL database designed for high availability, effortless scale, and control over data placement.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & Database Engineer
Back-end Developer & Database EngineerContributions:294 reviews, 101 PRs, 18 pushes in 1 year
Contributions summary:Kevin primarily focused on enhancing and maintaining the CockroachDB database, specifically in the area of backup and restore functionality. Their contributions include refactoring the resume and onfail/cancel logic to support compaction, implementing the backup compactions feature, and improving the correctness of the restore by fixing several issues related to data integrity and consistency. They updated existing tests to use the new `BACKUP INTO` and `RESTORE FROM ... IN` syntax. Additionally, they added a builtin for running backup compactions and removed index/bytes columns from backup/restore results.
distributed-sqldistributed-sql-databasemysqlsql-databasesql
kev-cao/dotfiles
Nov 2020 - May 2022
Contributions:28 commits, 46 pushes, 1 branch in 1 year 6 months
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