# Zhiyong Tan > Staff Software Engineer | Turns Ambiguous Systems Into Scalable Products Location: Cupertino, California, United States Profile: https://flows.cv/zhiyong https://www.manning.com/books/acing-the-system-design-interview At Uber, full-stack development of internal data tools. At Teradata Aster, integration of Aster Database with R. At Manage, I designed and built products across the data analytics and machine learning pipeline, building various ETL pipelines, then machine learning models based on the ETL pipelines. At NativeX, I experimentally evaluated and productionized features from first and third-party data sources into machine learning models. My expertise also includes building Real Time Bidding (RTB) Bidder Bidding Strategy models for programmatic buying of ad inventory, which I did at Flurry. I am also experienced with mobile and embedded systems development, such as Android and Windows Phone applications, especially location-based applications. I have considerable experience with Xilinx Field Programmable Gate Arrays, as well as software projects involving C++ and Java programming. My undergraduate degree is in Applied Physics, and I spent much of my undergraduate time working on projects involving organic semiconductor device fabrication as well as other scientific projects. ## Work Experience ### Staff Full Stack Engineer 3-1 @ TikTok Jan 2024 – Present | San Jose, California, United States Data Platform - Experimentation & Evaluation - Lead AB Experimentation Platform teams across San Jose, China, and Singapore to develop advanced experimentation features, including sample size calculator, AA experiments, and time slice experiments. - Features adopted by major business units including Ads Monetization and E-Commerce. Thousands of experiments have been created, contributing to conversion lifts. ### Creator @ 听写 Jan 2018 – Jan 2024 | San Francisco Bay Area Created an app for Chinese as a 2nd language learners. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.zhiyong.tingxie https://apps.apple.com/us/app/%E5%90%AC%E5%86%99-chinese-spelling-dictation/id6462944919 The app have been downloaded over 1000 times. Active installs tend to hover between 150-200. Featured in an online newsletter in 2022. https://www.littledayout.com/we-tried-three-parent-review-of-3-ting-xie-apps/#:~:text=Apps-,%E5%90%AC%E5%86%99%20App%20%28Google%20Play%20only%29 Check out our Instagram and Facebook. https://www.instagram.com/tingxiechinese/ http://facebook.com/profile.php?id=100069794723668 Backend in Scala Play. I wanted to try something different, and was interested in functional programming then. I initially tried Haskell Yesod but decided to go with Scala Play. Mobile app was initially in native Android Java, then started to code new components in Kotlin; I then rewrote the whole app in React Native for both Android and iOS. I also implemented Python scripts for various OCR (Optical Character Recognition) jobs, using OCR libraries such as pytesseract, easyOCR and Google's Document AI. Lastly, I have an internal React web app for managing the app's content. ### Manager, Software Developer 2 @ PayPal Jan 2021 – Jan 2024 | San Jose, California, United States - From January 2023, I managed development of services related to delivering transaction reports to PayPal merchants. - From April to October 2022, I managed 3 operations teams (~21 people in total) that onboard and monitor merchants. My main achievement was improving incident response time from days to minutes/hours by overseeing the development of training, runbooks, and automated scripts. - Among 30 employees globally who were selected for the PayPal Emerging Leaders Program 2023. - Awarded Key Talent Equity in 2023. ### Manager, Software Development @ PayPal Jan 2020 – Jan 2021 | San Jose, California, United States Manage of a full stack team of 7 engineers and 1 UX designer across 5 countries, and informally manage 2-3 QA engineers. Working together with backend and machine learning teams to mold and realize the vision of personalized PayPal user experiences. Lead design and development of UI for an internal web application for creation and analytics of personalization campaigns, and contribute to frontend development in React and backend development in Java. Collaboration with multiple engineering teams on user-friendly internal tools for creation of cross-platform components, that can be created once and used across PayPal's Android, iOS, and web apps; these tools are synergistic with our personalization tools. ### Full Stack Lead Engineer @ PayPal Jan 2020 – Jan 2020 | San Jose, California, United States ### Senior Software Engineer @ Uber Jan 2018 – Jan 2020 | San Francisco Bay Area Lead cross team efforts between Data and Privacy to design and develop tools and infrastructure for automated PII tagging of HDFS and SQL databases by machine learning and search and discovery of privacy metadata on Uber’s datasets. Full stack implementation of a service to sync business metrics across the organization. Contributor to a query rewriter service for GDPR compliance, for access control of Uber’s DBs by services and employees, including Hive, SQL, and Vertica.Products are used daily by thousands of employees across data science, operations (including city ops and privacy ops) and analytics. Frontend development in React & Redux. Backend mainly in Java, Scala, and Python. ### Software Engineer II @ Uber Jan 2016 – Jan 2018 | San Francisco Bay Area ### Software Engineer II @ Teradata Aster Jan 2015 – Jan 2016 | San Francisco Bay Area Integration of Aster Database with R, to enable R scripts to use the massively parallel processing architecture of Aster Database; R uses a single core by default. Wrote wrapper functions in R for Aster SQL MapReduce functions, along with accompanying manuals (in Rd format) and unit tests. Emphasis on functions for natural language processing and machine learning. ### Big Data Engineer @ Manage.com Jan 2015 – Jan 2015 | San Francisco Bay Area Design and implementation of ETL pipelines for machine learning, employing Hive to replace the previous MySQL DB for massive throughput increase. Development of data management platform from 2nd and 3rd party data, including creation and validation of user profiles. Application of Spark machine learning frameworks such as clustering for ad bidder targeting. Scripting in Python, HiveQL (including Java UDFs), MySQL. ### Senior Data Engineer @ NativeX Jan 2013 – Jan 2014 | San Francisco Bay Area Experimentally evaluate and productionize features from first and third-party data sources into machine learning models, contributing to considerable revenue lift. Proficient in writing Python and Java MapReduce jobs. Contributed thousands of lines of production code in languages including Python, R, and SQL. Experiments using various machine learning technologies including R gbm(), Python scikit-learn, Weka, Hive, mrjob. Supervised 5 interns in various machine learning projects. Wrote most of the onboarding documentation for new data science hires. ### Software Engineer, Intern @ Flurry, Inc. Jan 2013 – Jan 2013 | San Francisco Bay Area • Machine learning applied to Real Time Bidding (RTB) Bidder Strategy for programmatic purchase of ad inventory • Built various machine learning models utilizing methods including logistic regression, linear regression, online learning • Contributed a few thousand lines of Python • Machine learning packages used were Weka, scikit-learn, LibSVM, LibLinear, and Vowpal Wabbit, with Python, Java, and C++ for scripting ### Research Assistant @ National University of Singapore Jan 2010 – Jan 2010 | Singapore This was a full-time job requiring a Bachelors of Science. I was never a student in the National University of Singapore. Left this job to enter graduate school at Rice University. Study of DNA-HNS interactions with magnetic tweezers. Some viruses reproduce by sending their DNA into the bacteria cytoplasm, where it merges with bacteria DNA and begins making copies of itself. One of the mechanisms of bacteria immune system against viruses is to synthesize HNS proteins which bind to and immobilize the invasive viral DNA. I used magnetic tweezers to determine the elastic coefficient of viral DNA after immobilization by differing amounts of HNS, contributing to the understanding of the mechanobiology of DNA-HNS interactions. ### C4 (Command and Control Information Systems) Signaler @ Singapore Army Jan 2004 – Jan 2006 | Singapore Did field setup of surveillance systems, involving wireless cameras, antenna, and servers. Wrote technical manuals for laymen on classified military software (command, control and communications). Leaving certificate records “outstanding performance”, “very good conduct” by battalion commanding officer. ## Education ### Master's degree in Electrical Engineering Rice University Jan 2010 – Jan 2013 ### B.S in Applied Physics Nanyang Technological University Singapore Jan 2007 – Jan 2009 ## Contact & Social - LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/zytan - Website: http://zhiyongtan.blogs.rice.edu/ --- Source: https://flows.cv/zhiyong JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/zhiyong/resume.json Last updated: 2026-03-22