# Zian Ke > Senior Software Engineer at Apple | CMU, UMich & SJTU Alumni Location: New York, New York, United States Profile: https://flows.cv/zian ## Work Experience ### Senior Software Engineer @ Apple Jan 2021 – Present | New York, New York, United States • Building the next-generation platform powering Apple Pay, designing and implementing scalable systems with microservices, gRPC, Kafka, Kubernetes, etc. ### Intern, Member of Technical Staff @ VMware Jan 2020 – Jan 2020 | Palo Alto, California, United States • Worked on Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (Kubernetes runtime for deployments and operations across multi-cloud infrastructure), involved in the next-gen Kubernetes Service APIs design (Gateway and xRoute for L4 & L7 load balancing and ingress). • Implemented Nginx-based reference controller to get the new Service APIs working end-to-end, by translating Gateway specs to Nginx ConfigMaps and creating distributed deployments with protocol-specific routing for TCP & HTTP(S). • Designed new CRDs (IP/IPPool) for IPv4/IPv6 address management, and controller for dynamic address allocation and binding, which can be integrated into Nginx or other general-purpose load balancers in Kubernetes cluster. • Made presentations and demos to Kubernetes founder and SIG-Network members on the Service APIs implementation. • Contributed to multiple Tanzu projects, e.g., EndpointSlice support in Contour (Envoy-based ingress controller). ### Teaching Assistant @ Carnegie Mellon University Jan 2020 – Jan 2020 | Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States • Worked with Prof. Majd Sakr in 15-319/15-619: Cloud Computing. • As the leading TA of Team Project, redesigned the "Blockchain Service" to introduce dynamic mining difficulty and RSA signature, and improved the "Twitter Analytics System" which handles 10,000+ RPS with Java, MySQL & HBase based on 1TB dataset. • Rewrote Apache JMeter Test Plan with Groovy to support "cache compiled script" and achieved 4× speedup compared to Beanshell Assertion, and integrated it into Live Test Load Generators running on 40+ VMs in AWS Auto Scaling group. • Migrated the Reference Server from Amazon EC2 to EKS for better scalability with HPA, higher maintainability with ECR, and zero downtime with rolling update, and automated the provisioning process (e.g., VPC, ALB, Fargate) with Terraform. • Participated in the QA of multiple projects (e.g., "Containers" which builds Kubernetes clusters on GCP and Azure), fixed bugs in the grading service and suggested improvements on the project design. ### Teaching Assistant @ UM-SJTU Joint Institute, Shanghai Jiao Tong University Jan 2019 – Jan 2019 | Shanghai, China • Worked with Prof. Weikang Qian and Prof. Paul Weng in VE280: Programming & Elem. Data Structures. • Created 5 lab projects, including a C++ version of 2048, Legends of the Three Kingdoms (card game), and implementation of skip list and rope data structures. • Designed exam problems e.g. Pseudoperfect Number to test students' understanding of recursion and linked list. • Gave tutorials on Linux virtual machine setup on VMware and VirtualBox, installation of Windows Subsystem for Linux, and team collaboration with GitHub. ### Co-Founder and Tech Lead @ AuraMaze.org Jan 2018 – Jan 2019 | Ann Arbor, Michigan, United States • Created a museum guiding app supporting 3000+ museums and 140,000+ artworks, with which users can identify paintings with camera, listen to audio intros, comment on favorite artworks and get personalized recommendation. • Implemented a low-latency painting recognition algorithm based on OpenCV contour detection and image signature hash function, with 95%+ query accuracy and tolerance of rotation, resizing and compression. • Utilized Nginx as load balancer to redirect requests to multiple servers running Express.js and Flask RESTful API. • Authenticated users with JWT and Passport.js to support login with username & password, Gmail, Facebook. • Built an Elasticsearch text search engine with support for multi-languages, fuzzy query, search result highlighting. • Developed a distributed message system using Kafka, with Amazon Aurora as the main producer and Debezium capturing all database changes, and containerized microservices using Docker to serve as the message consumers. • Worked closely with UMMA, published the app on iOS App Store which has received 500+ downloads and all 5-star ratings. ### Research Assistant @ University of Michigan Jan 2018 – Jan 2019 | Ann Arbor, Michigan, United States • Worked on the Table Embeddings project instructed by Prof. Michael Cafarella. • Analyzed 233 million tables from web HTML, in order to explore the explicit relationships between labels and entities as well as the implicit relationships between table columns. • Wrote parallel computing programs with Python multiprocessing and Hadoop MapReduce to obtain information of column label frequency and entity distribution. • Built PyTorch neural networks and LSTM models to predict missing column labels and achieved 88% accuracy. ### Software Engineering Intern @ MPOWER Financing Jan 2018 – Jan 2018 | Washington, District of Columbia, United States • Developed a Salary Prediction Model to serve as credit reference for international student loans. • Cleansed H1B datasets by recognizing keywords with NLTK and Lucene inverted index & tf-idf similarity. • Built Linear Regression and Random Forest Regression models with scikit-learn, based on Mincer earnings function and Burr distribution formulas, to predict average salary of 6399 occupations in 67 countries and 7593 colleges. • Initialized the company-wide data warehouse on Amazon RDS PostgreSQL and S3, to ensure durable storage and long-term analytics of research datasets, and refactored data loaders to improve code portability by accessing data from cloud. ### Tech Lead @ University of Michigan Chinese Students and Scholars Association Jan 2017 – Jan 2018 | Ann Arbor, Michigan, United States • Founded the CSSA Apps project (https://app.um-cssa.org) to develop web applications for UMich freshman students. • Developed the web front-end in React, with Redux as state container, Ant Design as UI style theme, React Router as client-side router, React Motion and Ant Motion as animation design tools. • Designed reuseable components such as react-stretchable-button (published on NPM with 2100+ downloads). • Implemented a search engine based on Chinese text segmentation, Hadoop MapReduce indexing and tf-idf scores. • Deployed multiple React clients and Flask servers on Azure virtual machine with Nginx as reverse proxy. ### Research Assistant @ Shanghai Jiao Tong University Jan 2017 – Jan 2017 | Shanghai, China • Worked on the Fingerprint Minutiae Extraction Based on Deep Learning project instructed by Prof. Manhua Liu. • Generated partial fingerprint figures containing minutiae, with MATLAB Image Processing Toolbox, based on manually labeled fingerprint datasets to serve as training data. • Achieved 98.47% accuracy in classifying partial fingerprint figures with and without minutiae by building a Convolutional Neural Network with TensorFlow. • Determined the coordinates of minutiae in a raw fingerprint image according to the classification results of cropped figures, which can be taken as the input of fingerprint matching algorithm. ## Education ### Master of Science - MS in Information Networking Carnegie Mellon University Jan 2019 – Jan 2021 ### Bachelor of Science in Engineering - BSE in Computer Science University of Michigan Jan 2017 – Jan 2019 ### Bachelor of Science in Engineering - BSE in Electrical and Computer Engineering Shanghai Jiao Tong University Jan 2015 – Jan 2019 ### High School Diploma Shanghai High School Jan 2012 – Jan 2015 ## Contact & Social - LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/zianke - Website: https://zian.ke - GitHub: https://github.com/zianke --- Source: https://flows.cv/zian JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/zian/resume.json Last updated: 2026-03-23