Rain Li
Undergraduate Student Researcher
Old Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolRain Li is an undergraduate robotics engineer and researcher with 13 years of software experience, blending practical backend work on large open-source systems like TiDB and SeaweedFS with cutting-edge research in robot perception and navigation. Currently developing LLM-driven agentic workflows and a real-time scene-graph memory for vision-language navigation at U of T, Rain has applied advanced 3D Gaussian Splatting and unified camera models to autonomy problems at Huawei and in robotics labs. Their contributions to TiDB show careful low-level systems craftsmanship (nil/length checks and PROXY protocol support), while SeaweedFS work demonstrates experience building distributed storage interfaces and concurrency-safe operations. Comfortable shipping both research prototypes and production-facing code, Rain pairs strong systems debugging instincts with a knack for reducing data requirements—e.g., cutting reconstruction views from ~20 to ~4 in real-world scenarios.
13 years of coding experience
1 year of employment as a software developer
High School Diploma, High School Diploma at Saint Thomas Aquinas High School - North VancouverBachelor of Applied Science - BASc Engineering Science Robotics Engineering, Bachelor of Applied Science - BASc Engineering Science Robotics Engineering at University of Toronto Engineering
Github Skills (15)
data-storage10
databases10
distributed-systems10
object-storage10
go10
distributed-file-system10
sql10
tikv10
database10
mysql9
distributed-database9
filesystem9
blob-storage9
cloud-native8
distributed-transactions7
Programming languages (9)
Github contributions (5)
pingcap/tidb
Aug 2017 - Aug 2022
TiDB - the open-source, cloud-native, distributed SQL database designed for modern applications.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:62 reviews, 25 commits, 50 PRs in 5 years 1 month
Contributions summary:Rain contributed to the TiDB database, focusing on low-level improvements and feature enhancements. They addressed potential issues by adding nil checks and length checks within the codebase, preventing errors like nil dereferences and index out-of-range errors. Their work included support for the PROXY protocol, indicating an understanding of network protocols and server configuration. Additional commits involved modifying the underlying codebase to make it more robust.
ai-poweredtidbserverlesshtapreal-time
seaweedfs/seaweedfs
Aug 2021 - Aug 2022
SeaweedFS is a fast distributed storage system for blobs, objects, files, and data lake, for billions of files! Blob store has O(1) disk seek, cloud tiering. Filer supports Cloud Drive, cross-DC active-active replication, Kubernetes, POSIX FUSE mount, S3 API, S3 Gateway, Hadoop, WebDAV, encryption, Erasure Coding.
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:2 reviews, 25 commits, 11 PRs in 1 year
Contributions summary:Rain primarily contributed to the TiKV filer store implementation within the SeaweedFS project, focusing on core functionalities. Their work included initializing the TiKV store, implementing essential entry APIs (insert, update, find, delete), and directory APIs (delete folder children, listing entries). Furthermore, they integrated features like delete range concurrency and the onePC functionality, and performed UI enhancements by adding file rename support.
kubernetes-replicationfuseerasure-codingfile-storagedata-storage
Find and Hire Top DevelopersWe’ve analyzed the programming source code of over 60 million software developers on GitHub and scored them by 50,000 skills. Sign-up on Prog,AI to search for software developers.