Zhenhuan Gao
Software Engineer at Aptos
United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolZhenhuan Gao is a software engineer with 11 years of experience building high-performance storage and blockchain infrastructure, currently focused on core infra and ecosystem work at Aptos. He helped design and ship Diem’s storage from the ground up—authoring the Jellyfish Merkle Tree—and has deep expertise optimizing RocksDB and database interactions in large-scale systems. At Meta he engineered ads ranking infrastructure and made production RocksDB improvements (e.g., DirectIO and SeekForPrev), reflecting a blend of systems-level rigor and product-driven impact. His open-source contributions to prominent projects like rocksdb, aptos-core, and diem highlight a track record of performance tuning, concurrency fixes, and storage-layer innovations. Collected across academia and industry, his background pairs a strong research foundation (UIUC MS, 3.85 GPA) with pragmatic production engineering.
11 years of coding experience
9 years of employment as a software developer
University of Illinois Urbana-ChampaignBachelor of Engineering (B.Eng.), Information Engineering, Bachelor of Engineering (B.Eng.), Information Engineering at Shanghai Jiao Tong University
Github Skills (21)
transaction10
storage-engine10
transactional10
c-language10
databases10
storage10
datastore10
data-structure10
performance-optimization10
blockchain10
data-structures10
pact10
rust10
pac10
cprogramming-language10
Programming languages (6)
Github contributions (5)
aptos-labs/aptos-core
Apr 2022 - Jan 2023
Aptos is a layer 1 blockchain built to support the widespread use of blockchain through better technology and user experience.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:1 release, 964 reviews, 92 commits in 8 months
Contributions summary:Zhenhuan's contributions primarily revolved around implementing and modifying core components of the Aptos blockchain, with a focus on storage and transaction processing. The user was involved in optimizing database interactions within the schemadb and jellyfish-merkle modules. Moreover, they implemented new methods, improved and optimized the existing codebase for efficient blockchain operation.
blockchain-platformblockchainuser-experienceblockchain-networksmart-contracts
diem/diem
Jun 2019 - Nov 2021
Diem’s mission is to build a trusted and innovative financial network that empowers people and businesses around the world.
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:142 reviews, 148 commits, 172 PRs in 2 years 5 months
Contributions summary:Zhenhuan primarily contributed to the storage components of the Diem project, specifically focusing on the data structures used in the blockchain. They made changes related to the schema database, including setting options and getting live data sizes of column families. Additionally, the user worked on the transaction accumulator, altering the node key and making improvements to its operations.
diemfinancialtrustedethereumblockchain
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