Zihao Xu
Software Engineer IV at Databricks
Sunnyvale, California, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolZihao Xu is a Software Engineer IV based in Sunnyvale with four years of experience building high-performance back-end systems and stream processing features. At Databricks he’s contributed to Delta Lake and is now focused on agentic/harness engineering, bringing practical production experience from internships to senior roles. Open-source work on RisingWave shows deep engagement in stream processing—refactoring Kafka sinks to use FutureProducer and adding array/regex SQL functions and optimizations that improve throughput and expressiveness. He’s also implemented concurrency control and B+ tree enhancements in the educational BusTub DB and solved algorithmic challenges in Rust for doocs/leetcode, reflecting solid systems and algorithms chops. Colleagues would notice his mix of pragmatic engineering (shipping connectors and Spark-related fixes) and curiosity-driven contributions. Outside work he’s a cat lover, a small personal detail that surfaces across his GitHub presence.
4 years of coding experience
1 year of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Science With Distinction - BS, Computer Science, Bachelor of Science With Distinction - BS, Computer Science at Purdue University
English, Chinese
Github Skills (39)
algorithms10
transaction10
spark10
c-language10
concurrent10
delta-lake10
bplustree10
lintcode10
testing10
data-engineering10
databases10
kafka10
btree10
data-structure10
scala10
Programming languages (8)
Github contributions (5)
risingwavelabs/risingwave
Jun 2023 - Jul 2024
Stream processing platform for developers.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:241 reviews, 103 PRs, 437 pushes in 1 year 1 month
Contributions summary:Zihao primarily focused on enhancing the Kafka sink connector within the risingwave project. Their contributions involved refactoring the Kafka sink by replacing the transaction conductor with FutureProducer for improved efficiency and performance. The user added several new functions related to `array_min`, `array_max`, `array_sort`, `array_sum`, `regexp_split_to_array` functions, and introduced the constant lookup optimization for case-when expressions. This involved modifying existing code and introducing new functionalities related to regex and array operations, indicating a focus on extending the stream processing capabilities.
data-streamserverlessstreamdistributed-sql-databasedatabase
cmu-db/bustub
Sep 2022 - Sep 2023
The BusTub Relational Database Management System (Educational)
Role in this project:Back-end Developer & Database Engineer
Back-end Developer & Database EngineerContributions:7 reviews, 11 PRs, 25 comments in 1 year 1 month
Contributions summary:Zihao primarily contributed to the core database management system, focusing on concurrency control and B+ tree implementation. Their work involved implementing and modifying lock management, including adding shared pointers and ensuring format consistency across the codebase. The user also added support for batch operations in the B+ tree printer tool, and implemented overloaded versions for Insert() and Delete() functions for testing. Furthermore, the user modified and improved code related to transaction management and testing infrastructure.
management-systemrelationaldbmsdatabase-management-systemrelational-database
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