Raymond Zhao
Software Engineer at Microsoft
Seattle, Washington, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolRaymond Zhao is a pragmatic software engineer based in Seattle with 11 years of hands-on experience building reliable, user-focused systems across frontend, backend, and low-level projects. A University of Waterloo CS alum, he’s shipped features at Microsoft and Facebook—including Emmet and VS Code settings UI improvements and a multi-tab Android recyclerview experience for Messenger—while also modernizing legacy internal tools at Snowflake with React-Redux. He enjoys readable, maintainable code (he writes Python scripts for fun) and has a track record of improving performance and developer UX, from adding permalinks for on-call tooling to trimming Drupal form times by 25 seconds. Comfortable working across languages and layers, Raymond has also tackled kernel-level work at NVIDIA and contributed to popular open-source projects like Emmet, VS Code, Electron, and the Language Server Protocol. Notably, he combines shipping product-facing features with developer productivity wins—reducing boilerplate via a Scala Djinni generator and automating docs builds—making him effective in cross-functional teams.
11 years of coding experience
2 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor’s Degree, Computer Science, Bachelor’s Degree, Computer Science at University of Waterloo
English, Chinese
Github Skills (42)
accessibility10
page-layout10
javascript10
c-language10
npm10
layout10
multiplatform10
electron10
css10
gulp10
responsive-design10
process-management10
typescript10
user-interface10
cross-platform10
Programming languages (18)
Github contributions (5)
microsoft/vscode
Sep 2020 - Jan 2023
Visual Studio Code
Role in this project:
Front-end Developer
Front-end DeveloperContributions:6 releases, 1988 reviews, 451 commits in 2 years 4 months
Contributions summary:Raymond contributed to the development of the Visual Studio Code application by modifying settings-related UI components. Their contributions involved updating and modifying settings labels, fixing UI issues, and adjusting the layout of the Settings editor, specifically the arrangement of elements and overall aesthetic of the UI. They also worked on fixing accessibility issues related to the settings editor interface. The changes touched upon code related to the layout of the settings editor and the rendering of the widgets within it.
visual-studio-codeelectronvscodevscode-extensionmicrosoft
microsoft/vscode-docs
Oct 2020 - Dec 2022
Public documentation for Visual Studio Code
Role in this project:DevOps Engineer / Automation Engineer
DevOps Engineer / Automation EngineerContributions:145 reviews, 107 commits, 92 PRs in 2 years 2 months
Contributions summary:Raymond primarily focused on build automation tasks within the `vscode-docs` repository. Their commits modified the `gulpfile.js` file, which suggests involvement in the build process and possibly deployment steps. The changes include modifications to the build steps, and removal of a client. Furthermore, one commit bumped gulp and switched to npm. The user's work appears to focus on ensuring efficient and automated builds.
vscodevscode-extensionvisual-studio-codevisual-studio
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