# James Gao > Principal Software Engineer at Meta, ex-Principal Software Engineer at Twitter Location: Redwood City, California, United States Profile: https://flows.cv/jamesgao ## Work Experience ### Principal Software Engineer @ Meta Jan 2023 – Present | Menlo Park, California, United States ### Principal Software Engineer @ Twitter Jan 2022 – Jan 2023 | San Francisco Bay Area Chief Architect for the Twitter Ads system. Uber TL for the Twitter Ads Engineering Team. ### Sr Staff Software Engineer @ Twitter Jan 2019 – Jan 2022 | San Francisco Bay Area Uber tech-lead for Twitter's ads engineering team. Project: - Drove and led the re-architectured Twitter's monolithic adserver into microservices. - Scaled the Twitter Ads system to handle the 2020 traffic surge during COVID-19. - Led Twitter's App Install Ads initiative. - Led Twitter's cost-saving effort in the revenue organization, landed 100M+ infrastructure cost savings. ### Interim Director @ Twitter Jan 2020 – Jan 2020 | San Francisco Bay Area Interim director for Twitter's Revenue Platform organization. The org owns foundational systems such as ads serving, ads callback, ads analytics, and ads billing/payment that power the Twitter ads business. ### Staff Software Engineer @ Twitter Jan 2018 – Jan 2019 | San Francisco, California Tech-lead for Revenue Serving Platform (aka Ads Serving) team at Twitter. Projects: - Project Yi: Automated testing framework and release framework to achieve daily deploy for Twitter's adserver ### Senior Software Engineer @ Twitter Jan 2017 – Jan 2018 | San Francisco, California Ads serving team (under revenue platform). Tech leads for Twitter core adserver. Projects: - PD-RTB: Integrate Twitter's ad supply with 3rd party demand via open RTB - Adserver Next: A new generation of ads serving flow to support strong data dependency check and separation of concern. ### Software Engineer II @ Twitter Jan 2015 – Jan 2017 | San Francisco, CA Projects: - Rasam: Adserver's realtime serving analytics and debugging framework - Profile Ads: Monetizing Twitter's profile pages - Tweet Details Ads: Monetizing Twitter's Tweet Details supply - NLF Live Mid-roll Ads: Serving personlized mid-roll ads during the NFL live stream games on Twitter. ### Research Assistant @ UC Davis Jan 2010 – Jan 2015 | Davis, CA, 95616 A project, part of the Network Science Collaborative Technology Alliance (NSCTA), including fundamental studies of modeling and analyzing networks by capturing their group behaviors. Model communication and social networks by hypergraphs and simplicial complexes. Study and analyze problems in the hypergraph-based networks with big data. Design and analyze efficient algorithms and data structures for hypergraph-based networks. Implement and test algorithms with artificial designed and real-world data. ### Teaching Assistant @ UC Davis Jan 2011 – Jan 2011 | Davis, CA, 95616 Teaching assistant for cource Probabilistic Analysis of Electrical and Computer Systems (EEC161). Graded homework and mid-terms. Host discussion session. ### Research Assistant @ Tsinghua University Jan 2010 – Jan 2010 Designed algorithms and developed software for breast cancer X-ray imaging. Analyzed the physical and mathematical models of breast cancer imaging of regular and scattered X-ray. Constructed simulated 3D breast models, including both healthy and cancer tissues. Designed and implemented simulated imaging algorithms. Analyzed radiation dose rates and imaging performances under different imaging methods and parameters. ### Marketing Intern @ NUCTECH COMPANY LIMITED Jan 2009 – Jan 2009 Market research on radiation sterilization. Developed software on collecting radiation sterilization related patents and products. Mined the market trends in radiation sterilization by analyzing collected data. ### Research Assistant @ Tsinghua University Jan 2008 – Jan 2008 Study of 3D reconstruction and robot routing based on a single camera. Designed and implemented algorithms for extracting and tracking vision features using OpenCV. Designed and implemented robot routing algorithm based on Kalman filter. ## Education ### Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) in Electrical, Electronics and Communications Engineering University of California, Davis ### Bachelor's degree in Engineering Physics Tsinghua University ### General Studies Chongqing Foreign Language Middle School ## Contact & Social - LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/james-gao-5043911b - Portfolio: http://web.ece.ucdavis.edu/~jhgao/ --- Source: https://flows.cv/jamesgao JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/jamesgao/resume.json Last updated: 2026-04-12