Zhitao Li is a Director of Engineering based in Palo Alto with 11 years of experience building and leading large-scale AI and infrastructure teams, currently heading Uber’s AI infrastructure org. He has deep distributed-systems and DevOps roots from early contributions to prominent open-source projects like Apache Mesos and Aurora, where he improved scheduler/executor reliability and service discovery. Zhitao’s career spans senior technical leadership roles at Google (including work on TensorFlow Extended) and multiple tenures at Uber, reflecting both hands-on engineering and management at hyperscale. He combines a rigorous testing and systems mindset—evident from extensive executor lifecycle and master API work—with product-focused delivery, enabling ML platforms to move from prototype to production. Trained with an M.S. in Computer Science from Stony Brook and a B.S. from Zhejiang University, he’s comfortable shifting between low-level infrastructure code and high-level AI platform strategy.
11 years of coding experience
14 years of employment as a software developer
B.S Computer Science, B.S Computer Science at Zhejiang University
M.S Computer Science, M.S Computer Science at Stony Brook University
Contributions:87 commits, 5 PRs, 3 comments in 2 years 11 months
Contributions summary:Zhitao's contributions centered on enhancing the core functionality of the Apache Mesos project, specifically related to executor management and container lifecycle events. They implemented features to notify framework schedulers of executor exits, ensuring more reliable event handling and improved system stability. Furthermore, the user's code changes show a focus on testing, with extensive modifications to the test suite, including adding tests for edge cases related to the executor's lifecycle. The contributions also show work on the master API.
Apache Aurora - A Mesos framework for long-running services, cron jobs, and ad-hoc jobs
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & DevOps Engineer
Contributions:6 commits in 7 months
Contributions summary:Zhitao contributed to the Apache Aurora scheduler, focusing on core functionalities and infrastructure. Their work included enhancements to resource allocation, specifically accepting resource offers from multiple framework roles. They also addressed build and deployment processes by adding dependencies like `jq` to the build process. Furthermore, the user implemented features to set `DiscoveryInfo` in Mesos tasks, enabling alternative service discovery methods.
auroracron-jobsapachemesos-frameworklong
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