Ze Li
Principal Data & Applied Scientist Lead (Full Stack)
Davis, California, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolZe Li is a Principal Data & Applied Scientist Lead at Microsoft with over a decade of experience building cloud-native, full-stack data platforms and production ML/LLM systems to ensure Azure’s reliability and scalability. He combines a Ph.D. in Computer Engineering and a strong publication record (40+ peer-reviewed papers, 1000+ citations) with hands-on engineering—designing ETL/real-time pipelines, CI/CD, and distributed clusters across Hadoop, Kafka, Spark, HBase, and Redis. Ze has led cross-functional projects from backend database fixes (notably contributing correctness improvements to the TiDB open-source distributed SQL project) to reactive front-ends using React/D3, and he architects agentic AI frameworks for operational automation. His background spans algorithm design, complex network analysis, game-theoretic incentive mechanisms, and applied ML for anomaly detection, capacity planning, and auto-diagnosis. Comfortable in Java, Python, Scala and system automation (Terraform, Chef, Consul), he bridges deep research credentials with pragmatic engineering that ships at cloud scale. Based in Davis, CA, Ze blends academic rigor with production-grade impact, often surfacing subtle correctness and data-integrity fixes that improve long-term system trustworthiness.
10 years of coding experience
9 years of employment as a software developer
Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) Computer Engineering, Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) Computer Engineering at Clemson UniversityBachelor Electrical and Information Engineering, Bachelor Electrical and Information Engineering at Huazhong University of Science and Technology
Github Skills (9)
databases10
go10
sql10
mysql10
database10
distributed-database9
datatypes9
error-handling8
distributed-transactions8
Programming languages (11)
Github contributions (5)
pingcap/tidb
Apr 2017 - Sep 2019
TiDB - the open-source, cloud-native, distributed SQL database designed for modern applications.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & Database Engineer
Back-end Developer & Database EngineerContributions:59 reviews, 6 commits, 159 PRs in 2 years 5 months
Contributions summary:Ze contributed to the TiDB database project by addressing several issues related to the core functionalities. They fixed a bug in the `group_concat` function and implemented error handling for altering auto-increment. Additionally, they made crucial changes to correctly convert strings to hexadecimal or bit representations, improving data type handling. Their work demonstrates a focus on enhancing the database's correctness and data integrity.
ai-poweredtidbserverlesshtapreal-time
bobotu/tidb
Apr 2017 - Dec 2020
TiDB is a distributed NewSQL database compatible with MySQL protocol
Contributions:498 pushes, 244 branches in 3 years 9 months
mysqltidbsqldistributed-databasefoundationdb
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