Summary
Ricky Zhou is a software engineer with nine years of hands-on experience in systems and database internals, currently working at ByteDance in San Francisco. A Carnegie Mellon CS undergraduate, he has combined research and production work—building in-memory HTAP systems, optimizer operators, and buffer pool components—while contributing to enterprise engines like SayonaraDB at Salesforce. He has a knack for debugging and performance tuning, evidenced by tooling to diagnose OOM issues and a background creating testing and pricing frameworks at Microsoft. Comfortable across research and product environments, he also codes iOS projects on the side, reflecting a breadth from low-level database internals to client-facing development.
9 years of coding experience