# Lu Niu

> Software Engineer at Pinterest

Location: San Francisco Bay Area, United States
Profile: https://flows.cv/luniu

Blog: http://qqibrow.github.io
Github: github.com/qqibrow
SO: http://stackoverflow.com/users/1646996/qqibrow

## Work Experience
### Senior Staff Software Engineer @ Pinterest
Jan 2024 – Present | San Francisco Bay Area

### Staff Software Engineer @ Pinterest
Jan 2019 – Present
Streaming data processing at Pinterest

### Senior Software Engineer @ Uber
Jan 2016 – Jan 2019 | San Francisco Bay Area
Presto
Build up Presto@Uber to power multiple user cases including dynamic pricing, driver promotion, ML feature engineering, A/B testing and so on. 

- Parquet Reader optimization. Support nested column in QueryPlan and Parquet Reader, speedup query performance by 2-10X.
   https://eng.uber.com/presto/ 

- Presto Geospatial Query Optimizer. Build and query geospatial index during query execution, without user query rewriting. dropping down vcore seconds by 3X, execution time by 1.7X.
    https://www.oreilly.com/ideas/query-the-planet-geospatial-big-data-analytics-at-uber
    https://dataworkssummit.com/san-jose-2018/session/geospatial-data-platform-at-uber/

-  Cache File Metadata in Presto, reducing HDFS Namenode RPC by 50%
-  Support Security in Presto as IPO readiness efforts
-  Developing common Proxy Layer to intelligently redirect queries to multiple query engines.

Query Translator
Translate Vertica SQL to Presto SQL

### Software Engineer @ Yahoo
Jan 2015 – Jan 2016 | Sunnyvale CA
Ads&Data team in Yahoo
Designed and Implemented the Next Generation Yahoo’s User Profile Platform that powers Yahoo user modeling, profile serving and audience insights. This data platform supports fast data ingestion, random access and interactive ad-hoc query using state-of-art technologies including Spark, HBase, Kafka and Hive. Presented on Hadoop Summit 2016 San Jose.
https://www.slideshare.net/HadoopSummit/yahoos-next-generation-user-profile-platform-63920409

Working with Science Team to develop CPC Advertising Pipeline, in which machine learning models are trained and used in Real-time Bidding.

### Software Engineer @ Yahoo
Jan 2014 – Jan 2015 | Sunnyvale, CA
Worked in Yahoo Finance.
Built replay module across quotefeed servers, which can be used for raw data analysis, functional testing and performance testing.
Implemented library that converts Y!Finance data type to protocol buffer message using reflection.
Designed and implemented in-memory storage system using mdbm and boost asio. Improved QPS
by 120%
Implemented a series of scripts for performance investigation by leveraging tools like netstat, strace and powerful profilers like perf, systemtap and google perftools. Helped developers easily target high CPU usage functions, memory leak and root cause of latency.

### Student Researcher @ Information Sciences Institute
Jan 2013 – Jan 2014
Developing android and desktop app for content sharing networks that target countries and areas with limited Internet access due to government censorship.

### Software Engineering Intern @ Google
Jan 2013 – Jan 2013
Back-end Development in Google Streetview Innerspace. Improved the Automatic Pose Generation Algorithm by Floor Detection.

### Student Software Developer @ Sun Yat-sen Univeristy
Jan 2011 – Jan 2012
Worked as a student developer in Computer Vision Lab, mainly focusing on implementation of a video surveillance system.


## Education
### Master of Science (MS) in Computer Science
University of Southern California

### Bachelor of Engineering (BE) in Computer Software Engineering
Sun Yat-sen University


## Contact & Social
- LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/luniu
- Portfolio: http://qqibrow.github.io/
- GitHub: http://github.com/qqibrow
- Portfolio: http://stackoverflow.com/users/1646996/qqibrow

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