Pingkai Liu
Principal Engineer at Confluent
New York, New York, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolPingkai Liu is a Principal Engineer based in New York with over a decade of experience designing high-performance, large-scale system software grounded in rigorous mathematical reasoning. He has led strategic cloud and data lake initiatives at AWS—shaping S3-based storage optimizations and zero-ETL ingestion—and now applies that expertise at Confluent. His background spans research-grade distributed storage and backup frameworks at AT&T Labs Research, low-latency trading systems at Bloomberg, and a startup that pushed UDP/P2P video streaming well beyond BitTorrent performance. Comfortable moving between research and production, he blends formal operations-research thinking with hands-on systems architecture to solve cost, performance, and scalability tradeoffs. Collected training in operations research and stochastic mathematics complements a career pattern of turning theoretical insight into practical, deployable platforms. He’s as likely to sketch a provably efficient design as to ship the code that makes it run at internet scale.
10 years of coding experience
20 years of employment as a software developer
B.S, Mathematics (with concentration on stochastics), Computer Science(minor), B.S, Mathematics (with concentration on stochastics), Computer Science(minor) at Freie Universität BerlinM.S., Operations Research, M.S., Operations Research at Columbia University in the City of New YorkTsinghua University
English, German, Chinese
Github Skills (65)
json-data10
tokenizer10
storage10
filesystem10
parsing10
server10
glusterfs9
linux9
high-availability9
file-format9
parser9
rsync9
bitmap9
json9
replication9
Programming languages (2)
Github contributions (5)
att/snappy
Dec 2016 - Jan 2021
backup/restore framework designed for the cloud infrastructure
Contributions:64 commits, 19 pushes, 1 branch in 4 years 2 months
kindofblue/udptest
Sep 2018 - Sep 2018
Contributions:3 pushes, 1 branch in 4 days
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