# Aaron Zhang > Senior Backend Software Engineer Location: San Francisco, California, United States Profile: https://flows.cv/aaronzhang Staff-level backend software engineer. Passionate about leveling up engineering code quality and building strong engineering teams. ## Work Experience ### Head of Engineering @ Babs Jan 2026 – Present ### Senior Software Engineer @ Snowflake Jan 2023 – Jan 2025 | San Francisco Bay Area ### Senior Backend Software Engineer @ Sisu Jan 2019 – Jan 2023 | San Francisco Bay Area • Lead team of four to deliver the organization and user onboarding experience and authentication mechanism for the embedded Sisu experience inside of Looker, which was part of a critical company initiative and our partnership with Google. I worked with stakeholders inside and outside of the company to design the onboarding experience and built out a SSO flow for the extension by developing an OAuth2 Authorization server. • For Sisu’s dashboard and visualizations features, I developed the data models in PostgreSQL and built the APIs to power the React app. When metrics showed users were experiencing slow page loads, I imple- mented tracing using OpenTelemetry in our application to root cause and solve these performance issues. • Optimized database queries that were slowing down key APIs serving the Sisu application by investigating the PostgreSQL query planner and applying remediation based on those findings, which involved adding indexes and using database triggers to denormalize expensive aggregation operations, leading to a median endpoint latency improvement of 30% and improving some query executions by over 300X. ### Software Engineer ICT4 @ Apple Jan 2018 – Jan 2019 | Cupertino Build systems to handle payments at Apple with emphasis on robustness, correctness, and reusability. Utilized technologies such as FoundationDb, Kafka, Cassandra, and Dropwizard. ### Software Engineer ICT3 @ Apple Jan 2016 – Jan 2018 ### Head Student Instructor @ CS 169 Software Engineering at UC Berkeley Jan 2016 – Jan 2016 | UC Berkeley Under direction of Professor Armando Fox, administered upper-division computer science class that serves 500 students a semester. Led a team of student instructors and graders to create engaging lesson plans and exams. Programmed system for the automating of recording and computing of grades that saved our teaching staff a combined total of 20 hours a week. Mentored seven student project teams in through the semester to develop SaaS apps for Bay Area non-profits to meet their technological needs. Helped students prioritize tasks and provide engineering advice. ### 169 UGSI @ UC Berkeley Jan 2015 – Jan 2015 Taught and administered the upper division software engineering course. ### Software Engineer @ UC Berkeley Jan 2015 – Jan 2015 | Berkeley Led a team of 3 that designed a new open-source programming assignment autograder. Built a new autograder using edX XQueue API to accept and analyze student project and homework submissions in order to scale up online courses. Implemented a system to generate detailed rubric breakdowns and report them back to the students. Wrote and maintained 20,000 lines of modular code with end-to-end integration and unit tests. Deployed on Amazon EC2 for 5+ courses with over 2,000 students this semester. ### Software Engineering Intern @ NetApp Jan 2014 – Jan 2014 ## Education ### Bachelor of Arts (B.A.) in Computer Science UC Berkeley Jan 2012 – Jan 2016 ## Contact & Social - LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/aaron-zhang-39321b72 --- Source: https://flows.cv/aaronzhang JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/aaronzhang/resume.json Last updated: 2026-03-22