Xiang Gu
Software Engineer at Citadel
New York, New York, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolXiang Gu is a software engineer with 7 years of experience specializing in distributed data systems and database internals, now based in New York and currently at Citadel. He was a key contributor at Cockroach Labs, helping build next-gen online transactional schema-change infrastructure for CockroachDB and fixing complex migration and catalog leasing issues in a high-availability distributed SQL engine. His internships at Google and Amazon produced large performance wins—orders-of-magnitude latency improvements for a Spanner-backed ML artifact store and reducing a Kindle backfill from 45 minutes to under 5 seconds—showcasing a blend of systems thinking and pragmatic engineering. With an MS from UT Austin and research roots in reinforcement learning, he brings rigorous academic training to production-grade distributed systems. Outside work he’s a sports fan, suggesting a competitive, team-oriented mindset that complements his deep technical focus.
7 years of coding experience
3 years of employment as a software developer
Master of Science - MS, Computer Science, Master of Science - MS, Computer Science at The University of Texas at AustinBachelor of Science - BS, Computer Science, Bachelor of Science - BS, Computer Science at Shanghai Jiao Tong University
Stackoverflow
11reputation
174reached
0answers
1question
Github Skills (15)
management10
databases10
go10
postgresql10
catalog10
sql10
relational-databases10
database-design10
index-management10
sql-database10
database10
testing9
type-inference6
typescript6
react6
Programming languages (5)
Github contributions (5)
cockroachdb/cockroach
Feb 2022 - Jan 2023
CockroachDB — the cloud native, distributed SQL database designed for high availability, effortless scale, and control over data placement.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & Database Engineer
Back-end Developer & Database EngineerContributions:524 reviews, 154 commits, 244 PRs in 10 months
Contributions summary:Xiang's contributions primarily focused on database-related tasks within the CockroachDB project. They added defensive checks and fixed discrepancies in migration code, specifically addressing issues in catalog leasing and system table definitions. The user also implemented code to ensure correct functionality in `ALTER PRIMARY KEY`, including handling storage parameters and the proper handling of comments. They demonstrated a good understanding of database internals, schema changes, and migration processes.
distributed-sqldistributed-sql-databasemysqlsql-databasesql
Xiang-Gu/cockroach
Mar 2022 - Feb 2024
CockroachDB - the open source, cloud-native distributed SQL database.
Contributions:547 pushes, 264 branches in 1 year 11 months
distributed-sqloltpdistributed-sql-databasemysqlsql-database
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