Yaxiong Zhao
Member Of Technical Staff at Stealth Embodied AI Startup
San Francisco, California, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolYaxiong Zhao is a seasoned software engineer and founder with 7+ years building cloud-native and observability systems, currently based in San Francisco. He helped architect Pixie, an eBPF-based Kubernetes observability platform acquired by New Relic, and has deep backend experience contributing to high-impact open-source projects like pixie-io/pixie and iovisor/bcc. His career spans early distributed systems work at AWS (founding Kinesis contributor) and systems leadership at Google on Borg, then moving into founding startups focused on serverless GPU infrastructure and emotionally aware AI companions. Yaxiong blends low-level systems expertise (eBPF, BPF tooling, Redis protocol work) with product-minded engineering and a founder’s appetite for building from zero to acquisition. He now works on embodied AI at a stealth startup, applying both technical depth and an unusual emphasis on emotional intelligence in AI. His profile reflects a rare combination of infrastructure craftsmanship, open-source impact, and entrepreneurial drive.
7 years of coding experience
12 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Engineering (BE) Transportation Engineering, Bachelor of Engineering (BE) Transportation Engineering at Tongji UniversityDoctor of Philosophy (PhD) Computer Science, Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) Computer Science at Temple University Graduate SchoolMaster of Engineering (MEng) Software Engineering, Master of Engineering (MEng) Software Engineering at Tsinghua University
English, Chinese, southern min
Stackoverflow
1reputation
0reached
0answers
0questions
Github Skills (16)
c-language10
go10
cprogramming-language10
bcc10
grpc9
distributed-systems9
debug9
debugging9
api8
ebpf8
apidoc8
telemetry8
system-programming7
sys7
system7
Programming languages (9)
Github contributions (5)
pixie-io/pixie
Apr 2019 - Dec 2022
Instant Kubernetes-Native Application Observability
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:35 reviews, 1036 commits, 9 PRs in 3 years 8 months
Contributions summary:Yaxiong primarily contributed to the core functionalities of the Pixie project, as evidenced by the addition of various test headers, the implementation of client streaming, and the enhancement of Redis protocol support. They worked on modifying core structures for performance optimization and fixed existing functionality issues. Their work touched on the core components of the project, which included adding code, changing existing ones, and testing the changes.
pixieobservabilitymonitoringkubernetes-nativeeks
iovisor/bcc
Feb 2020 - Sep 2022
BCC - Tools for BPF-based Linux IO analysis, networking, monitoring, and more
Role in this project:Backend Developer
Backend DeveloperContributions:3 reviews, 11 commits, 11 PRs in 2 years 7 months
Contributions summary:Yaxiong primarily focused on modifying and enhancing the core functionality of the BCC tools. Their contributions included updating the `StatusTuple` class to utilize an enum for error codes, which likely improved code readability and maintainability. The user also refactored the codebase by replacing instances of `StatusTuple(0)` with `StatusTuple::OK()`, promoting more consistent and idiomatic code. Additionally, they added a function to free the symbol cache for a PID, improving memory management.
bpfbcclinuxnetworkingebpf
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