William Zhao
Software Engineer at Google
New York, New York, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolWilliam Zhao is a software engineer with 8 years of experience building production machine learning systems, currently applying ML to improve Google Search Ads quality in New York. He combines academic rigor from MIT (PhD) and Fudan (BS in Engineering Physics) with hands-on industry experience across Google, Microsoft research, and early-stage security entrepreneurship. His background spans NLP research, quantitative modeling for trading, and founding a network security startup focused on penetration testing and web vulnerabilities. William is an attentive back-end contributor to the widely used ICU project, where he has focused on code quality, compiler warning fixes, and platform-specific improvements like Windows time zone detection. That mix of production ML, low-level C/C++ maintenance, and security-first thinking gives him a rare ability to span from research prototypes to robust, maintainable systems. He’s comfortable navigating both large-company engineering processes and the rapid iteration culture of startups.
8 years of coding experience
3 years of employment as a software developer
Doctor of Philosophy - PhD, Aerospace, Aeronautical and Astronautical Engineering, Doctor of Philosophy - PhD, Aerospace, Aeronautical and Astronautical Engineering at Massachusetts Institute of TechnologyBachelor of Science - BS, Engineering Physics, Bachelor of Science - BS, Engineering Physics at Fudan University
Github Skills (14)
c1710
debug10
c-language10
c1110
cprogramming-language10
icu4c10
unicode9
cpp9
ember-i18n8
i18n-js8
wp-api8
rails-i18n8
winapi8
ws-api8
Programming languages (1)
Github contributions (2)
unicode-org/icu
Jul 2017 - Sep 2018
The home of the ICU project source code.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:11 commits, 3 PRs, 2 pushes in 1 year 2 months
Contributions summary:William primarily focused on fixing compiler warnings and addressing code issues within the ICU4C library. Their contributions involved correcting cast warnings, resolving unreferenced variable warnings, and ensuring code correctness. They also reverted some changes and merged warning cleanup fixes, demonstrating a focus on code quality and stability. Furthermore, the user has been working on improvements related to the Windows time zone detection and user locale.
cppc-plus-plusicu4cunicode-consortiumicu4j
mingyzha/icu
Aug 2018 - Sep 2018
The new home of the ICU project source code.
Contributions:10 pushes, 2 branches in 1 month
icu
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