Zhiru Zhu
PHD Student at University of Chicago
Chicago, Illinois, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolZhiru Zhu is a PhD student in Computer Science at the University of Chicago with 11 years of engineering experience focused on data privacy, governance, and scalable back-end systems. As an early engineer at Zilliz, he was a founding contributor to the open-source Milvus vector database, implementing core Java SDK components and contributing to CMake-based build and Prometheus integrations for production readiness. He combines rigorous academic research with hands-on systems development—able to design gRPC-based clients, manage build dependencies, and instrument services for observability. Based in Chicago, Zhiru bridges research and production, bringing both theoretical depth and practical DevOps experience to data infrastructure problems. Notably, his open-source work on Milvus underpins a widely adopted vector search project used across the ML/AI ecosystem.
11 years of coding experience
1 year of employment as a software developer
Bachelor's degree, Computer Science, Bachelor's degree, Computer Science at Franklin & Marshall CollegeDoctor of Philosophy - PhD, Computer Science, Doctor of Philosophy - PhD, Computer Science at University of Chicago
Github Skills (13)
dependency-management10
javas10
cmake10
milvus10
sdk10
build-automation10
java10
grpc10
vector9
vector-math9
prometheus9
go8
zlib5
Programming languages (6)
Github contributions (5)
milvus-io/milvus
May 2019 - Mar 2020
Milvus is a high-performance, cloud-native vector database built for scalable vector ANN search
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & DevOps Engineer
Back-end Developer & DevOps EngineerContributions:543 commits, 238 PRs, 120 pushes in 9 months
Contributions summary:Zhiru's commits primarily focus on adding and modifying third-party packages to support the project's dependency requirements. The user demonstrates a good understanding of CMake by adding third-party packages and associated build configurations, as well as adjusting build scripts for optimization. They also show a familiarity with Prometheus by adding Prometheus library and setting up some relevant configurations.
approximate-nearest-neighbor-searchfaisshnswsimilarity-searchvector
milvus-io/milvus-sdk-java
Sep 2019 - Apr 2020
Java SDK for Milvus.
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:129 commits, 39 PRs, 3 pushes in 6 months
Contributions summary:Zhiru implemented the initial core Java SDK for the Milvus vector database. The contributions primarily involved creating the `MilvusGrpcClient.java` class, which establishes a gRPC connection to the Milvus server and provides methods for common database operations. These methods include creating collections, inserting vectors, searching for vectors, and managing indexes, laying the foundation for interacting with the Milvus database through a Java client. The commits demonstrate the ability to interact with a gRPC server and implement common database operations using Java.
sdkannsvectorjavajava-sdk
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.