Yan Zhang is a Staff Engineer based in Singapore with 12 years building high-performance, large-scale distributed systems and storage solutions. He specializes in low-level systems work—network programming frameworks, compiler-adjacent tools, and Linux system development—using C/C++, Python, Java and Scala. At StarRocks/CelerData he delivered impactful query-engine optimizations (COUNT DISTINCT, group-by, ORC/Parquet scanning, lazy materialization, IO coalescence and block cache) that drove multix performance gains on data lake workloads and underlie a Linux Foundation project. His open-source contributions include performance and correctness fixes to StarRocks and core work on the codership/galera replication stack, reflecting both deep algorithmic skill and production-grade rigor. Past roles at Microsoft, Amazon and startups show a pattern of turning systems-level insight into measurable product improvements like reduced IOPS, faster recovery, and massive indexing throughput. He pairs strong theoretical grounding in data structures and algorithms with pragmatic engineering that repeatedly squeezes orders-of-magnitude wins out of real-world systems.
12 years of coding experience
17 years of employment as a software developer
Master of Science - MS Computer Science, Master of Science - MS Computer Science at Shandong University
The world's fastest open query engine for sub-second analytics both on and off the data lakehouse. With the flexibility to support nearly any scenario, StarRocks provides best-in-class performance for multi-dimensional analytics, real-time analytics, and ad-hoc queries. A Linux Foundation project.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Contributions:3742 reviews, 316 commits, 1871 PRs in 1 year 4 months
Contributions summary:Yan focused on optimizing the `COUNT DISTINCT` aggregation function within the StarRocks database system. Their contributions involved modifications to aggregate function factories, state management structures, and code serialization/deserialization for improved performance. This work also introduced and optimized code related to group concatenation functionality. Furthermore, the user addressed issues in the Parquet format reader, including fixing type mismatches and handling potential errors during footer parsing.
Contributions summary:Yan primarily contributed to the core logic of the `codership/galera` repository, which involves synchronous multi-master replication. Their work focused on merging code from version 3.x, indicating a role in integrating and maintaining the codebase. The user also made changes to documentation, specifically the `mysqlwsrepoptions.rst` file. Moreover, they worked on addressing inconsistencies and improvements in the codebase.
mastermulti-masterreplicationsynchronous
Find and Hire Top DevelopersWe’ve analyzed the programming source code of over 60 million software developers on GitHub and scored them by 50,000 skills. Sign-up on Prog,AI to search for software developers.