# Guofu Zhong

> Principal Software Engineer at Microsoft | Distributed Systems, AI Platform, Search & Recommendation

Location: Bellevue, Washington, United States
Profile: https://flows.cv/guofu

Principal Software Engineer and tech lead with 9 years of experience building distributed systems, platform infrastructure, and large-scale backend services.

My work spans agentic platforms, AI/data infrastructure, search and recommendation systems, online advertising, and developer productivity. Across Microsoft and TikTok, I have led technical design and execution for mission-critical platform capabilities, high-scale backend services, and data-intensive workflows.

I’m particularly interested in building reusable platform foundations for AI-powered products, with a focus on reliability, execution quality, developer experience, and practical system design.

## Work Experience
### Principal Software Engineer @ Microsoft AI
Jan 2025 – Present | Redmond, Washington, United States
- Serve as a tech lead for agentic platform, building reusable platform capabilities for AIGC generation and feed recommendation.

### Staff Software Engineer @ TikTok
Jan 2023 – Jan 2025 | Bellevue, Washington, United States
- Led the Creative Infra team across the US and China, managing engineers and interns while driving quarterly execution, hiring, mentoring, and technical direction.
- Designed and led the implementation of an ads automation solution that automatically added AI-generated and in-house creatives to advertising campaigns based on supply strategy, reducing creative fatigue and improving CTR. The solution was integrated into TikTok Ads ad group creation flows and contributed to approximately 5% of TikTok creative revenue.
- Designed the multi-DC server, storage, and traffic topology to support global serving and multi-site high availability.
- Built similarity understanding infrastructure for video and image content to identify original, homogeneous, plagiarized, and remixed materials, contributing to a 7.6% lift in impressions, a 2.7% lift in clicks, and identification of 17% low-quality creators.
- Designed and led the adoption of a Python-DSL and C++ runtime recommendation framework for recommendation and search scenarios, enabling 40–70% latency improvements for migrated workloads while significantly improving developer productivity.

### Senior Software Engineer @ Microsoft
Jan 2016 – Jan 2023 | Bellevue, Washington, United States
BingAds - as a backend services tech leader, shipped multiple mission-critical products for the multi-channel advertising department, such as subscription-based advertising, unified smart campaign, channel partner API gateway, powered by recommendation system, distributed storage, Kubernetes, and business-related SDK.

UCM - as a DevOps tech leader, set up cloud DevOps infrastructure for the team from 0 to 1. Developing cloud test runner and optimizing deployer to speed up build & release performance and dev's productivity, Achieving next year's DevOps performance and productivity KPI in the current year.


## Education
### Bachelor's degree in Computer Software Engineering
Chongqing University of Post and Telecommunications
Jan 2012 – Jan 2016


## Contact & Social
- LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/guofu-zhong-4b9539143

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Source: https://flows.cv/guofu
JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/guofu/resume.json
Last updated: 2026-03-22