Lu Niu
Senior Staff Software Engineer at Pinterest
Sunnyvale, California, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolLu Niu is a Senior Staff Software Engineer with 13 years of experience building high-performance distributed data systems and streaming pipelines, currently driving platform work at Pinterest from Sunnyvale. He has deep expertise in query engines and columnar formats, contributing performance and feature improvements to widely used open-source engines Presto and Trino (including Parquet optimizations and Hive integrations). At Uber he led Presto adoption and optimizations that sped queries 2–10x, reduced core-seconds and HDFS RPCs, and added geospatial and security capabilities for production-scale analytics. Earlier roles at Yahoo and Google focused on low-latency data platforms, real-time bidding pipelines, and production performance tuning. Known for pragmatic, measurable impact, he combines systems-level profiling and caching strategies with practical feature work to reduce cost and latency. He also publishes technical writing and maintains an active GitHub/StackOverflow presence, reflecting a blend of engineering depth and community engagement.
13 years of coding experience
7 years of employment as a software developer
Master of Science (MS) Computer Science, Master of Science (MS) Computer Science at University of Southern CaliforniaBachelor of Engineering (BE) Computer Software Engineering, Bachelor of Engineering (BE) Computer Software Engineering at Sun Yat-sen University
English, Chinese
Github Skills (18)
big-data10
java10
javas10
hive10
sql10
parquet10
query-engine10
presto10
data-set9
sql-query9
data-model9
user-data9
distributed-database9
database8
databases8
Programming languages (9)
Github contributions (5)
prestodb/presto
May 2018 - Apr 2020
The official home of the Presto distributed SQL query engine for big data
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:9 reviews, 15 commits, 14 PRs in 1 year 11 months
Contributions summary:Lu contributed to the Presto distributed SQL query engine, focusing on performance and data processing efficiency. They corrected row input rate calculations in a Javascript file related to the stage UI. Additionally, the user optimized read time statistics within the Parquet data source and implemented functionality to expose Hive table properties via a system table. These changes directly impacted data processing and query performance within the system.
distributed-sqlquerybigdataquery-enginesql
trinodb/trino
Feb 2019 - Nov 2020
Official repository of Trino, the distributed SQL query engine for big data, formerly known as PrestoSQL (https://trino.io)
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:9 PRs, 46 comments, 3 issues in 1 year 9 months
Contributions summary:Lu contributed to the Trino query engine by fixing bugs and optimizing performance. They corrected row input rate calculations, improved read time statistics in the Parquet page source, and added a Hive directory listing cache. The user also exposed Hive table properties via a system table and implemented various enhancements to the Parquet writer.
prestodbdbmsindexingjdbcbigdata
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