# Michael Ho > Staff Software Engineer at Google Location: United States, United States Profile: https://flows.cv/michaelho1 ## Work Experience ### Staff Software Engineer @ Google Jan 2019 – Present | Sunnyvale, California, United States Spanner is Google's scalable, multi-version, globally-distributed, and synchronously-replicated database used by many critical Google services such as Google Ads, Gmail, Youtube, Google Docs and GCP etc. My charter at Google is to improve Spanner reliability to uphold Spanner's five-nines of availability and improve resource isolation between users in the multi-tenant deployment of Spanner for higher resource efficiency. ### Principal Software Engineer @ Cloudera Jan 2015 – Jan 2019 | San Francisco Bay Area - Committer of Apache Impala project, an open source, low latency MPP SQL analytic database. - Led a team of engineers to overhaul the Impala query engine distributed execution framework, resulting in much higher reliability and 6x throughput under large scale deployment (see blog post). This feature is critical in unblocking large scale deployment of Impala for some customers. - Incrementally improved the query engine's end-to-end latency via LLVM dynamic code generation for expression evaluation, software pipeling + cache prefetching for better join performance. Single-handedly drove the effort to lower the latency of dynamic code generation (50% reduction in latency for short query) via technique such as lazy loading of LLVM IR. - Participated in calls with customers on various escalation cases and worked closely with support team to identify the root causes and drove the cases to resolution. - Mentored new hires to help them get up to speed. ### Staff Engineer II @ VMware Jan 2008 – Jan 2015 Worked on various areas of the core hypervisor at VMware such as memory management, nested virtualization, virtual time keeping, VM migration, VM checkpointing and VM record/replay. Some interesting things I have built included a prototype for IO directed page sharing, shadow paging for nested virtualization to speed up certain guest OS such as Hyper-V by 2-4x and removing some bottleneck in the hypervisor to achieve 2~3x speedup in memory intensive workload for wide SMP VMs. ### Coop verification engineer @ AMD Jan 2006 – Jan 2006 Designed test plans for the Bulldozer processor for architectural features which span multiple stages of the pipeline (e.g. self-modifying code). Also looked into test plans for new features in AMD-V (e.g. clean bits support in VMCB). ### MTS Intern @ VMware Jan 2006 – Jan 2006 Improved the performance of a hypervisor when using hardware assisted virtualization: - deferred interrupt acknowledgement - streamlined the processing of frequent events such as hidden page faults. ### System Software Engineer Intern @ NVIDIA Jan 2006 – Jan 2006 Participated in the maintenance of laptop specific GPU's features such power saving (powermsizer) and management of external display devices. Collaborated with colleagues on a software prototype for dynamic switching between discrete and integrated GPU. ### MTS Intern @ VMware Jan 2005 – Jan 2005 Implemented an abstraction layer for hardware assisted virtualization features (i.e. Intel VT and AMD SVM). ## Education ### MS in Electrical and Computer Engineering Carnegie Mellon University ### Mining Massive Data Sets Graduate Certificate in Stanford Center for Professional Development Stanford University ### BS in Electrical and Computer Engineering Carnegie Mellon University ## Contact & Social - LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/michael-ho-2015742a --- Source: https://flows.cv/michaelho1 JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/michaelho1/resume.json Last updated: 2026-04-12