Mengdi Lin
Software Engineer at dbt Labs
New York, New York, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolMengdi Lin is a software engineer with 11 years of experience building high-performance, distributed systems and compilers, currently contributing to dbt Labs on a Rust-based compiler for semantic analysis of data workflows. Previously at Meta, she helped scale distributed k-means clustering for Llama4 pretraining, architected a next-gen distributed clustering platform, and worked on static SQL analysis and large-scale tracing backends. Her open-source work includes significant contributions to Meta’s Cinder project, where she optimized the CPython JIT by improving intermediate representations, control-flow handling, and dead-code elimination. Comfortable across backend, performance engineering, and compiler internals, she bridges research-grade systems and production deployments. Based in New York and trained at Columbia, she brings deep systems expertise paired with a practical focus on observability and debuggability—evident from enhancements like JIT-dump support that aid real-world debugging.
11 years of coding experience
8 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor's Degree Computer Science, Bachelor's Degree Computer Science at Columbia UniversityHigh School Advanced Regents Diploma With Honors, High School Advanced Regents Diploma With Honors at Stuyvesant High School
English, Chinese, Spanish
Github Skills (15)
performance-tuning10
compiler10
performance-analytics10
code-generation10
performance-monitor10
compiler-compiler10
performance-monitoring10
runtimes10
performance-analysis10
interpreter10
python10
jit10
performance-measurement10
cprogramming-language9
c-language9
Programming languages (6)
Github contributions (5)
facebookincubator/MetaPython
Sep 2022 - Jan 2023
This is Meta's fork of the CPython runtime. The name "cinder" here is historical, see https://github.com/facebookincubator/cinderx for the Python extension / JIT compiler.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & Performance Engineer
Back-end Developer & Performance EngineerContributions:1 review, 9 commits, 2 PRs in 4 months
Contributions summary:Mengdi primarily contributed to the Cinder project, which is Meta's internal performance-oriented production version of CPython. Their work focused on implementing and optimizing the compiler's intermediate representation (HIR) and LIR, specifically introducing an "Unreachable" instruction and optimizing the control flow graph. This included adding new instructions, refining type handling in conditional branches, and improving dead code elimination. Additionally, they incorporated the ability to dump JIT compiled functions, enhancing debugging and understanding of the compilation process.
compilercpythonjitpython-extensioninterpreter
mengdilin/presto
Nov 2021 - Jun 2022
The official home of the Presto distributed SQL query engine for big data
Contributions:57 pushes, 9 branches in 6 months
big-dataprestosql-query
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