Nanshu Chen
Principal Software Engineer at Roblox
San Francisco Bay Area United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolNanshu Chen is a Principal Software Engineer with 11 years of experience building large-scale distributed systems for global social platforms, now based in the San Francisco Bay Area and currently leading infrastructure work at Roblox. She has deep expertise in RPC, distributed traffic routing, Python and C++, and has driven critical projects at Meta including Thrift-Python and ServiceRouter that power data platforms and ML training/inference. Nanshu combines hands-on performance engineering with team leadership, having led backend efforts for Instagram Business to deliver scalable insights and analytics. She is an active open-source contributor to high-profile projects such as Facebook’s folly, hhvm, and fbthrift—where her work bridged folly coroutines with Python asyncio, improved Thrift exception handling, and added SSL and buffer controls. Her background spans R&D tools and automation in enterprise environments, anchored by a PhD in Optoelectronics and a BS in Materials Science, reflecting a rare mix of deep research training and production-grade systems engineering.
11 years of coding experience
19 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Science - BS Materials Science, Bachelor of Science - BS Materials Science at Fudan UniversityDoctor of Philosophy - PhD Optoelectronics, Doctor of Philosophy - PhD Optoelectronics at Nanyang Technological University Singapore
English, Chinese
Stackoverflow
1reputation
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Github Skills (19)
asynchronous10
c-language10
python10
async10
hacking10
hhvm10
asyncio10
php10
exception-handling10
cython10
folly10
thrift10
cprogramming-language10
serializer9
serializable9
Programming languages (3)
Github contributions (5)
facebook/fbthrift
May 2019 - Sep 2022
Facebook's branch of Apache Thrift, including a new C++ server.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:183 commits, 1 comment, 1 issue in 3 years 4 months
Contributions summary:Nanshu primarily worked on modifying and improving the `fbthrift` library. Their contributions included changing the way client and channel shared pointers are handled during disconnects to prevent race conditions in multithreaded environments. Additionally, they introduced a function to create default instances and made changes to the Cython code to optimize the process of getting default values, addressing stack overflow issues. Furthermore, the user added SSL support and exposed chunk buffer size options to Python, contributing to the project's security and flexibility.
cppthrift
facebook/folly
Jul 2019 - Sep 2022
An open-source C++ library developed and used at Facebook.
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:14 commits in 3 years 2 months
Contributions summary:Nanshu primarily contributed to the folly library, focusing on enhancements related to Python integration. They implemented features bridging `folly::coro::Task` and `folly::coro::AsyncGenerator` with Python's asyncio, enabling asynchronous operations. Code changes involved creating and modifying Cython files for Python bindings and adding C++ code to support the bridging functionality. The user also refactored exception handling and made performance improvements.
cpp
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