Victor Gao
Software Engineer at Aptos Labs
Palo Alto, California, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolVictor Gao is a software engineer with nine years of experience specializing in programming languages, virtual machines, and blockchain systems, currently focused full-time on the Move language and VM. A summa cum laude Mathematics and Computer Science graduate from UIUC and former ICPC regional champion and world finalist, he brings strong formal verification and competitive-programming rigor to systems design. He has led gas metering and VM optimization work for Move and contributed core testing and transaction features to Diem and Aptos, demonstrating deep familiarity with blockchain execution semantics. At Meta he modernized large C++ codebases like Folly and Proxygen via clang-tidy codemods and built developer tooling such as LLVM- and clang-tidy–based analyzers. Based in Palo Alto, he combines production-grade backend engineering with embedded firmware and PCB design hobbies, often writing Rust for microcontrollers. His work balances low-level VM safety (preventing stack-reference crashes) with practical developer ergonomics across open-source and product codebases.
9 years of coding experience
4 years of employment as a software developer
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
English, Chinese, Japanese
Github Skills (35)
c-language10
caffe10
clang-tidy10
testing10
http10
machine-learning10
verification10
virtual-machine10
refactor10
lua10
lang10
deep-learning10
code-migration10
bytecode10
vms10
Programming languages (10)
Github contributions (5)
diem/diem
Jun 2019 - Dec 2021
Diem’s mission is to build a trusted and innovative financial network that empowers people and businesses around the world.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & Blockchain Engineer
Back-end Developer & Blockchain EngineerContributions:417 reviews, 230 commits, 205 PRs in 2 years 6 months
Contributions summary:Victor implemented several functional tests related to account configuration, address substitution, and multiple transaction support within the Diem blockchain repository. They introduced new config options for defining accounts in transactions, enabling features like address substitution and the execution of multiple transactions within tests. Additionally, the user refactored the evaluation result structure and the test infrastructure to improve expressiveness and checking algorithms. They also worked on serialization/deserialization stage of the tests.
diemfinancialtrustedethereumblockchain
move-language/move
Oct 2022 - Dec 2022
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:154 reviews, 20 commits, 84 PRs in 2 months
Contributions summary:Victor primarily focused on gas metering and VM optimization within the Move language project. Their contributions include adding more detailed information to the gas meter for function calls, as well as implementing gas metering for various bytecode instructions and operations, such as dropping frame values and deserialization. Furthermore, the user introduced and implemented VMConfig to dynamically configure the VM and related binary format versions. They also worked on preventing VM crashes related to local stack references, which shows an understanding of the VM's internal mechanisms and potential pitfalls.
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