Zixian Cai
Research Scientist at Google DeepMind
Greater Sydney Area Australia
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolZixian Cai is a research scientist and systems engineer with 11 years of experience building high-performance runtimes, garbage collectors, and hardware-aware programming language abstractions. He combines academic rigor—PhD work at ANU and contributions to research projects like MMTk and the Mu micro VM—with practical production experience at Google, DeepMind, Twitter, Microsoft, and contributions to OpenJDK’s core JVM code. His work spans hardware architecture, compiler/runtime co-design, and performance analysis tools, and he has a track record of fixing architecture-specific issues (aarch64, RISC-V) in critical open-source infrastructure. Known for making low-level systems both faster and safer for programmers, he also brings teaching and mentorship experience from multiple university courses. Notably, he blends research publications with hands-on fixes in widely used platforms like the JDK, reflecting both deep theory and pragmatic engineering.
11 years of coding experience
8 years of employment as a software developer
Australian National University
Stackoverflow
955reputation
108kreached
27answers
2questions
Github Skills (18)
jvm10
java10
javas10
openjdk10
risc-v9
arm9
cross-compiling8
build-system8
crossbuild8
pip6
map-function6
html6
flask6
flask-login6
python6
Programming languages (27)
Github contributions (5)
openjdk/jdk
Nov 2020 - Oct 2023
JDK main-line development https://openjdk.org/projects/jdk
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:3 reviews, 7 PRs, 19 comments in 3 years
Contributions summary:Zixian contributed to the Java Development Kit (JDK) by modifying code related to low-level system operations and architecture-specific implementations. They addressed inconsistencies in method signatures, particularly in areas like array copy operations and write barrier methods, across different CPU architectures such as aarch64 and riscv. The user also addressed build issues and provided instructions for cross-compilation, demonstrating familiarity with build systems.
openjdkjavajvmjdk
caizixian/homebrew-cask
Mar 2020 - Feb 2025
🍻 A CLI workflow for the administration of macOS applications distributed as binaries
Contributions:16 pushes, 8 branches in 5 years
cliworkflowdistributed-applicationsadministrationbinaries
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