Yihua Zhang
Software Engineer at Google
Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolYihua Zhang is a software engineer with nine years of experience building secure, reliable back-end systems, now contributing to YouTube Analytics at Google from Zurich. He has deep expertise in transport security and RPC frameworks, demonstrated by notable contributions to the widely used gRPC and grpc-go projects—adding ALTS/GTS plugins, improving TSI handshakes, and hardening credential and security-level APIs. His background in mechanical engineering (BS from Shanghai Jiao Tong University and MS from Carnegie Mellon) gives him a systematic, analytic approach to complex system design and debugging. Colleagues rely on him to tackle subtle race conditions and security edge cases that often go unnoticed until production, helping large-scale distributed systems operate safely and predictably.
8 years of coding experience
Master's degree, Mechanical Engineering, Master's degree, Mechanical Engineering at Carnegie Mellon UniversityBS, Mechanical Engineering, BS, Mechanical Engineering at Shanghai Jiao Tong University
Stackoverflow
1reputation
0reached
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Github Skills (13)
c1710
golang10
it-security10
rpc10
go10
c1110
grpc10
protocol-buffers10
security10
testing9
openssl9
microservices8
microservices-application8
Programming languages (4)
Github contributions (5)
grpc/grpc
Jul 2017 - Apr 2022
The C based gRPC (C++, Python, Ruby, Objective-C, PHP, C#)
Role in this project:
Back-end & Security Engineer
Back-end & Security EngineerContributions:49 reviews, 150 commits, 226 PRs in 4 years 9 months
Contributions summary:Yihua primarily contributed to the security aspects of the gRPC project. They added a GTS (later renamed to ALTS) plugin, modifying files related to transport security and plugin registry. The user also added a TSI test library, including SSL and fake TSI tests, and modified the TSI handshake to correctly handle `TSI_INCOMPLETE_DATA`. Additionally, they fixed a race condition in `grpc_tsi_alts_shutdown()` and updated the ALTS proto code. They also incorporated ALTS into interop tests.
objective-ccpppythongrpcphp
grpc/grpc-go
Jan 2020 - Sep 2021
The Go language implementation of gRPC. HTTP/2 based RPC
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:25 reviews, 5 commits, 7 PRs in 1 year 8 months
Contributions summary:Yihua primarily contributed to the gRPC-Go implementation, focusing on enhancing the credentials and security aspects of the gRPC framework. Their work included creating APIs for transport security level information, implementing local credentials, and addressing issues related to PerRPCCredentials and security levels. Furthermore, the user added support for security level checks in various gRPC components. These modifications suggest a focus on improving the security and reliability of gRPC communication.
golangnanoservicesrpcprotoprotobuf
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