# Cathy Zhang

> Chief Architect/Senior Principal Engineer--Cloud Platform and Service

Location: Palo Alto, California, United States
Profile: https://flows.cv/cathyzhang1

I have many years of experience designing and developing software, from concept to launch. My current responsibilities at Intel’s Cloud SW Engineering include leading the team to build a SW stack on Intel's HW to boost the performance, scalability, affordability, and security of the cloud infrastructure. I am also responsible for defining the cloud-native strategy and driving company-wide contribution to the open-source cloud ecosystem. Before this, I worked at Futurewei Inc., managing a team of senior architects and leading the engineering team to deliver innovative cloud technologies. I led the team to build a serverless platform from the ground up and launched it as part of Huawei’s public cloud offering. I also led the team to develop a global resource orchestration and scheduling platform across large-scale cloud sites and edge sites. In addition to project design and development, I helped define the company’s strategy around emerging technologies and regularly advised top executives on which cutting-edge technologies we should adopt and why.
I sit on the Technical Oversight Committee | Cloud Native Computing Foundation, which provides technical leadership to the industry’s cloud-native community. I have acted as track chair for both Kubecon and OpenStack Summits. I co-authored several CNCF Specifications and have been a guest speaker at numerous international conferences and summits (Kubecon, OpenStack, OSCON, OPNFV, ONF, etc.). On behalf of Intel, I delivered a keynote address at Kubecon NA 2022.
I have a Ph.D. degree in computer engineering and hold 21 US-granted patents with another 8 in the US Patent Office pipeline.

## Work Experience
### Principal Engineer II @ Confluent
Jan 2024 – Present
Led the development of a Compute Platform to deploy and run Confluent services like Kafka and Flink, optimizing cost, performance, usability, security, and reliability.

### Tech Lead of Cloud Native AI Working Group @ Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF)
Jan 2023 – Present | https://tag-runtime.cncf.io/wgs/cnaiwg/charter/

### Technical Oversight Committee @ Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF)
Jan 2022 – Present

### Senior Principal Engineer @ Intel Corporation
Jan 2021 – Jan 2024 | Santa Clara, California, United States
---Design a new snapshot-based approach to instantiate an application container, which greatly reduces the cold start latency. Lead the team to solve all the technical challenges and develop the SW stack.
---Design a fast container scaling approach through an elastic Kubernetes POD mechanism. Lead the team to solve all the technical challenges and develop the SW stack.
---Lead the engineering team to develop network IO and disk IO resource scheduling and isolation which provides an IO performance guarantee for critical workloads running in the Kubernetes cluster. The solution enables cloud providers to pack more workloads onto a server and avoid noisy neighbor problem
---Give a keynote speech at Kubecon NorthAmerica 2022 on behalf of Intel
---Represent Intel in the Linux Foundation Edge Multi-Cluster Orchestration Technical Steering Committee.

### Chief Architect/Distinguished Engineer @ Futurewei Technologies, Inc.
Jan 2011 – Jan 2021 | Santa Clara, California, United States
Chartered the Cloud Resource Orchestration and Scheduling Platform.
- Designed a distributed, shared-state, lock-free, concurrent scheduling platform that supports global-scale resource orchestration and scheduling (up to 10K data centers+edge sites).
- Innovated a new partition scheme to achieve high global scalability and low scheduling interference
- Innovated a multi-dimensional optimization-based scheduling algorithm
- Led a team to develop and deliver the new Kubernetes-like distributed VM/Container concurrent scheduling platform

Chartered the Cloud Serverless Platform
- Set the Serverless technology direction and product development roadmap.
- Led a team of architects and engineers to design/develop a high-performing and scalable Serverless Platform, successfully delivered the Platform into Huawei’s Public Cloud. 
- Co-authored the CNCF serverless white paper and CloudEvents specification. 
- Led the Serverless Workflow Specification writing in the CNCF community.

Chartered the Cloud Network Service Project
- Led a team of engineers to deliver the Service Chaining technology into Huawei’s Private Cloud.
- Won the Project Lead position in the OpenStack community and led the open source team consisting of architects and engineers to deliver three official OpenStack service chaining releases.	
- Co-authored the IETF Network Service Header Standard Specification.

Chartered the Cloud Networking Project
- Analyzed industry trends on SDN, NFV, and network virtualization technologies. Provided insight/vision on next generation Cloud Data Center architecture and technology to executives.
- Led the team to successfully deliver the VXLAN network virtualization architecture, software design, and coding.

### Technical Lead @ Cisco
Jan 1998 – Jan 2011 | San Jose, California, United States
•	Cloud Computing Technology Group 
•	Network Access and Aggregation Technology Group
•	High Availability Technology Group
•	Voice Technology Group Computing Technology Group


## Education
### B.S. in Electrical Engineering
Tsinghua University

### Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering
State University of New York at Buffalo


## Contact & Social
- LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/cathy-zhang-cloud

---
Source: https://flows.cv/cathyzhang1
JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/cathyzhang1/resume.json
Last updated: 2026-04-12