# Yao Zhang

> Software Engineer at Fireworks AI

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

## Work Experience
### Software Engineer @ Fireworks AI
Jan 2024 – Present
Enabling blazing fast serving of LLMs. Early member of a core technical team building distributed inference runtime.

### Principal Architect @ Microsoft
Jan 2021 – Jan 2024 | Mountain View, California, United States
I’m the engineering lead (AI Framework area) for a company-wide initiative to enable AMD GPUs for Microsoft AI workloads. Architected and led the development for AMD backends of ONNXRuntime and in-house inference stack for OpenAI models. Enabled GPT4 models on MI300 GPUs with leading performance/price, announced in Microsoft Build. Worked across Microsoft teams to deploy the model for CoPilot applications.

### Director of Engineering @ Ant Financial
Jan 2018 – Jan 2021 | San Mateo, CA
Built a core AI Infra team. Architected and implemented a new ML framework from scratch with core features including hierarchical IR-based auto-differentiation, static operator scheduling and memory optimization, ML-guided optimizations for sparse computations. Led cross-team effort to improve the efficiency of company's GPU fleet and supported multiple product areas.

### Software Engineer @ Google
Jan 2015 – Jan 2018 | Mountain View, CA
Google Brain/TensorFlow. 

I'm a founding member of TensorFlow's graph optimization framework Grappler:(https://github.com/tensorflow/tensorflow/tree/master/tensorflow/core/grappler). I authored a few of Grappler's very first graph optimizations and later took much of the leadership role of the project. Helped grow the project from supporting only CPU and GPU to a variety of backends today: TensorFlow Lite, TensorFlow.js, TensorRT, nGraph, XLA, and more, and from zero graph optimizations to over a dozen targeting both training and inference for all accelerator backends.

### Postdoctoral Researcher @ Argonne National Laboratory/University of Chicago
Jan 2012 – Jan 2015
Heterogeneous computer architecture and scientific computing


## Education
### Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) in Electrical and Computer Engineering
University of California, Davis


## Contact & Social
- LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/yao-zhang-91bb0b4

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Source: https://flows.cv/yaozhang
JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/yaozhang/resume.json
Last updated: 2026-04-05