Zesen Qian
Compiler Engineer at Jane Street
London, England, United Kingdom
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolZesen Qian is a compiler engineer at Jane Street with 12 years of experience bridging deep type theory and practical compiler work. He holds a PhD in Computer Science from Aarhus and an MS from Carnegie Mellon, and his research focus spans type systems, dependent types, linear logic and concurrency. Zesen contributes to Agda’s cubical library, simplifying core abstractions like SetTruncation/SetQuotients and adding algebraic and homotopy-group support—work that reflects both theorem-proving rigor and engineering pragmatism. Based in London, he combines formal modeling sensibilities with production compiler development, often turning advanced proofs and formalisms into maintainable code. Colleagues describe him as someone who models the world: he seeks elegant, provable designs rather than ad hoc hacks.
12 years of coding experience
Doctor of Philosophy - PhD Computer Science, Doctor of Philosophy - PhD Computer Science at Aarhus UniversityMaster of Science - MS Logic Computation and Methodology, Master of Science - MS Logic Computation and Methodology at Carnegie Mellon UniversityBachelor of Engineering - BE Computer Software Engineering, Bachelor of Engineering - BE Computer Software Engineering at Shanghai Jiao Tong University
wu-chinese, Chinese, English
Stackoverflow
141reputation
15kreached
1answer
0questions
Github Skills (7)
agda10
lib10
set-theory10
cubical-type-theory10
algebra9
linux6
dlopen6
Programming languages (21)
Github contributions (5)
agda/cubical
Feb 2019 - Jan 2020
An experimental library for Cubical Agda
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:11 commits, 10 PRs, 48 comments in 11 months
Contributions summary:Zesen contributed significantly to the `cubical` Agda library. Their work involved simplifying and refactoring existing code, specifically around `SetTruncation` and `SetQuotients`. They also added new functionalities like `Dec→Bool`, `DiffInt`, and advanced truncation methods (`elimSetTrunc2/3`). Furthermore, the user appears to have expanded the library with support for algebraic structures, implementing a `Group` module and defining homotopy groups.
agdacubical-type-theory
riaqn/cubical
Feb 2019 - Dec 2019
Contributions:5 PRs, 54 pushes, 11 branches in 10 months
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.