Tal Zaccai
Principal Research Software Engineer at Microsoft
Redmond, Washington, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolTal Zaccai is a Principal Research Software Engineer at Microsoft Research in Redmond with eight years at Microsoft and a total of over a decade building high-performance, production-ready systems. He specializes in architecting and implementing distributed back-end services and large-scale ML research tooling, combining theoretical mathematics training with hands-on engineering across MapReduce, multi-threaded real-time processing, and cloud-scale caching systems. At Microsoft he moved from research code ownership toward shaping architecture and productization, and contributed to the open-source Garnet remote cache project improving performance, correctness, and CI. Colleagues describe him as someone who enjoys designing systems from the ground up and making subtle but impactful improvements—cleanups and protocol fixes that materially boost reliability and throughput. He brings a pragmatic blend of research rigor and production experience, often surfacing non-obvious edge-case fixes that prevent subtle failures in distributed environments.
8 years of coding experience
16 years of employment as a software developer
Diploma, Computer Science, Diploma, Computer Science at Open UniversityBSc., Theoretical Mathematics, BSc., Theoretical Mathematics at Tel Aviv University
Hebrew, English
Github Skills (17)
caching10
dotnet-core10
code-cleanup10
backend10
csharp10
disk-cache10
object-cache10
memory-cache10
web-cache10
testing9
low-latency9
dotnet9
net9
latency9
asp-net9
Programming languages (1)
Github contributions (5)
microsoft/garnet
Mar 2024 - Apr 2025
Garnet is a remote cache-store from Microsoft Research that offers strong performance (throughput and latency), scalability, storage, recovery, cluster sharding, key migration, and replication features. Garnet can work with existing Redis clients.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:535 reviews, 287 PRs, 891 pushes in 1 year
Contributions summary:Tal contributed to code cleanup and refactoring tasks, addressing code style issues and fixing syntax errors within the project. They also implemented features like adding format steps to the CI workflow, fixing "wrong number of arguments" issues in object store commands and fixing issues in LTRIM and ZRANGE commands. The user also updated the website and added new functions for performance.
cachecache-storageclusterconcurrenthash-table
TalZaccai/garnet
Aug 2024 - Mar 2025
Garnet is a remote cache-store from Microsoft Research that offers strong performance (throughput and latency), scalability, storage, recovery, cluster sharding, key migration, and replication features. Garnet can work with existing Redis clients.
Contributions:37 PRs, 44 pushes, 3 branches in 7 months
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