Xi Cheng
Senior Software Engineer at Snowflake
Palo Alto, California, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolXi Cheng is a Senior Software Engineer based in Palo Alto with a strong foundation in computational mathematics and distributed systems, currently contributing to FoundationDB at Snowflake. Trained across computer systems, applied math, and mechanics (PhD-level), he excels at first-principles problem solving and has built production-grade compilers, distributed runtimes, and a high-performance distributed file system in Golang. His work spans low-level system and network programming in C/C++ through high-level scripting and web stacks, and he has repeatedly driven large-performance wins (e.g., 100x runtime improvements and orders-of-magnitude memory reduction). Comfortable mentoring teams and collaborating with cross-functional stakeholders, he blends research rigor from Stanford with hands-on engineering at startups to ship scalable, debuggable systems. A less obvious strength is his fluency across the full software stack—from coroutine and compiler internals to cloud-integrated storage behaviors—making him adept at tracing complex bugs from hardware-level interactions to application semantics.
2 years of coding experience
16 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor's degree Materials Science and Engineering, Bachelor's degree Materials Science and Engineering at Shanghai Jiao Tong UniversityDoctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) Computational Mechanics / Mathematics, Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) Computational Mechanics / Mathematics at Stanford University
English, Chinese
Github Skills (9)
foundationdb10
transactional10
key-value-store10
embeddable10
database9
key-value9
bigtable9
acid9
distributed-database9
Programming languages (1)
Github contributions (1)
apple/foundationdb
Jul 2023 - Sep 2023
FoundationDB - the open source, distributed, transactional key-value store
Contributions:1 review, 2 PRs, 1 push in 1 month
bigtabletransactionaldistributed-databasefoundationdbdatabase
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