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
data-engineering10
testing10
lintcode10
databases10
kafka10
btree10
data-structure10
scala10
Programming languages (9)
Github contributions (5)
risingwavelabs/risingwave
Jun 2023 - Jul 2024
Event streaming platform for agentic AI. Continuously ingest, transform, and serve event streams in real time, at scale.
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.
agentic-aievent-streamdatabasestream-processingrust
delta-io/delta
May 2024 - May 2026
An open-source storage framework that enables building a Lakehouse architecture with compute engines including Spark, PrestoDB, Flink, Trino, and Hive and APIs
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:52 reviews, 63 PRs, 75 comments in 2 years
Contributions summary:Zihao primarily contributes to the Delta Lake project, focusing on enhancements and fixes within the Spark connector. Their work involves modifying core components and implementing new features such as enabling UniForm, removing dropped columns during REORG PURGE, and fixing semantics in REORG UPGRADE UNIFORM. They also developed test suites and utilities to support UniForm, demonstrating a strong understanding of the project's architecture and internal workings.
prestodbsparktrinobig-dataanalytics
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