Zherui Cao - Senior Architect at NVIDIA

Zherui Cao

Senior Architect at NVIDIA

Shanghai, China

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Summary

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Senior

🎓

Top School

Zherui Cao is a Senior Architect based in Shanghai with a decade of experience building high-performance storage and data systems across companies like NVIDIA, Microsoft Azure, and Vertica. He specializes in back-end C++ development for columnar formats and data lakes, contributing significant bug fixes and feature work to foundational open-source projects such as Apache Arrow and Apache ORC. At Microsoft he focused on storage integrity and garbage collection for Azure, and at Vertica he engineered robust Parquet/ORC/Avro read-write paths for complex types. A former Google intern who optimized query execution in F1, he combines deep systems expertise with practical contributions to widely used data infrastructure—evidenced by Parquet-related enhancements in Apache Arrow that improve metadata handling and large-row support. Not actively seeking roles, he nonetheless continues to influence open-source data tooling from a hands-on architect’s perspective.

10 years of coding experience

6 years of employment as a software developer

Exchange Student, Information System, Exchange Student, Information System at Singapore Management University

Bachelor's degree, Computer Science, Bachelor's degree, Computer Science at Zhejiang University

Github Skills (12)

apache-arrow10

parquet10

data-structures10

c-language10

cprogramming-language10

apache10

data-structure10

orc10

encoding9

big-data9

api-design8

testing7

Programming languages (5)

JavaC++JavaScriptHTMLJupyter Notebook

Github contributions (5)

apache/orc

May 2018 - May 2021

Apache ORC - the smallest, fastest columnar storage for Hadoop workloads

Role in this project:

Back-end Developer

Contributions:3 reviews, 6 commits, 6 PRs in 3 years

Contributions summary:Zherui primarily contributed to bug fixes and feature enhancements within the Apache ORC project, a columnar storage format. Their work involved modifications to C++ code, including addressing issues related to versioning, data parsing, and metadata handling. Furthermore, the user added functionality such as adding user metadata to the writer and optimizing map vector batch handling. These contributions indicate an active role in improving the functionality and stability of the ORC file format implementation.

orccppworkloadscolumnar-storagefastest

apache/arrow

Aug 2019 - Sep 2021

Apache Arrow is the universal columnar format and multi-language toolbox for fast data interchange and in-memory analytics

Role in this project:

Back-end Developer

Contributions:7 commits, 9 PRs, 8 comments in 2 years 2 months

Contributions summary:Zherui primarily contributed to the Apache Arrow project by implementing and improving Parquet-related functionalities. Their work included bug fixes within the `parquet` directory, such as correcting the `GetSize` method in `ParquetInputWrapper`, addressing errors related to `BufferedInputStream` and `OutputStream`, and providing an API to retrieve metadata. Furthermore, the user implemented core functionalities for the project by adding a method for returning the file metadata as a string and adjusting the `rows_written_` variable to be of type `int64_t` to handle a larger number of rows.

memorymulti-languagetoolboxacceleratedarrow

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