Zhen Li
Senior Software Engineer Archiect - Data Platform
San Francisco Bay Area United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolZhen Li is a Senior Software Engineer and Architect in the San Francisco Bay Area with 10+ years building scalable, fault-tolerant data platforms and cloud data warehousing at companies like Netflix, Goldman Sachs, and Ayasdi. He designs end-to-end systems—from requirements and prototyping to production release—specializing in metadata, lineage, tiered S3 storage, and high-throughput pipelines that process millions of keys per day. At Netflix he led data lifecycle management and implemented lineage on AWS Neptune and ML-driven S3 tiering for cost-optimized storage; earlier roles focused on distributed ML job orchestration on YARN and large-scale financial compute. A pragmatic technical lead and mentor, he pairs deep distributed-systems research (PhD-level background) with hands-on backend work and notable open-source contributions to projects such as Alluxio and Netflix Metacat. Notably, he blends operational rigor—alerting, traceability, and deletion services—with creative optimizations like dynamic component pipelines and storage-class analytics.
10 years of coding experience
1 year of employment as a software developer
Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Distributed Computing, Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Distributed Computing at Rutgers University
English, Chinese
Github Skills (17)
back-end-development10
multithreading10
amazon-elasticsearch10
java10
javas10
elasticsearchquery10
aws-elasticsearch10
elasticsearch10
elasticsearch-api10
testing9
performance-optimization9
orchestrate9
orchestration9
data-analysis8
orchestration-framework8
Programming languages (3)
Github contributions (5)
Netflix/metacat
Dec 2016 - Dec 2019
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:25 releases, 4 reviews, 96 commits in 3 years
Contributions summary:Zhen was primarily focused on refactoring and enhancing the Elasticsearch integration within the Metacat project. Their commits involved significant modifications to the `ElasticSearchUtilImpl.java` file, which handles indexing, updating, and deleting data in Elasticsearch. They also addressed issues related to retrieving the merge index from fast properties and made several bulk-saving and deletion operations. Moreover, the user has made updates related to testing, including adding test for common view in hive.
Alluxio/alluxio
Jul 2015 - Aug 2015
Alluxio, data orchestration for analytics and machine learning in the cloud
Role in this project:Backend Developer
Backend DeveloperContributions:14 commits, 3 PRs, 9 comments in 12 days
Contributions summary:Zhen primarily contributed to the backend aspects of the Alluxio project. They refactored and optimized code, specifically related to block removal and the thread pool. The user also introduced improvements in the performance testing, altering the example code. Additionally, they worked on code style and formatting.
data-analysisvirtual-distributed-filesystemanalyticsorchestrationdata-science
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