About Me

Hi, this is Qichao, Staff Software Engineer and Tech Lead Manager at Uber, specializing in distributed systems and messaging platforms. Currently leading Uber’s trip-critical Kafka Messaging platform, responsible for reliability, on-call outcomes, and roadmap execution. Passionate about building scalable infrastructure that powers mission-critical services.

Outside of work, I am an FAA-certified Private Pilot, an ASA-103–certified sailor, and an occasional marathon runner.

Experience

Software Engineer, Tech Lead Manager (TLM)

Uber, Kafka - Platform Engineering

Led Uber’s trip-critical Kafka Messaging platform (Kafka Consumer Proxy/uForwarder, Kafka REST Proxy, uReplicator), accountable for reliability, on-call outcomes, and roadmap execution.

• Drove platform architecture: replication re-architecture, Flink-based ingestion, and AutoMQ/RBS adoption to improve durability and operational simplicity
• Cut consumer incident mitigation from ~3 hours to ~30 minutes by designing freshness-restore + automated failover/backfill workflows across KCP and replication pipelines
• Implemented and supporting: native/proxy clients, retryQ/DLQ, context propagation, zone isolation, workload rebalance, metadata storage (Zookeeper) and much more
• Owned uGroup (Kafka consumer monitoring) end-to-end
• ex-TLM of Kafka Control Plane, enhanced internal Kafka metadata management with cloud-like experience. Strengthened cross-region reliability through source-of-truth re-architecture

Also, Knowledge Platform Founding Member. Supporting Online Data AI transformation with:

• Built efficient CPU-based embedding generation service for large-scale near realtime ingestion
• Built knowledge data intake (WebSocket push, API fetch, etc) service featuring OpenSearch indexing, LanceDB persistence, and taxonomy/ontology extraction

Additionally, Active Uber Ring0 First Responder. Safeguarding the entire Uber as a Global incident responder / incident commander: coordinated cross-team mitigations including lockdowns and failovers during SEVs.

Software Engineer

Uber, Money - Core Services

Tech Lead of Collections & Cashouts team, moving money in and out of Uber for the areas of arrears collection and driver cashout, in a secure, efficient and scalable way.

• Led 3DS/SCA project, worked with 10+ teams and 10+ European banks to enable two-factor auth for credit card payment across 60+ payment flows in European Economic Area
• Integrated UberPay in arrears collection, instantly unlocking more payment service providers in different regions without repeated integration

Software Engineer

Uber, Identity - Security Engineering

• Maintained Uber’s 3rd party customer identity platform for OAuth and external provider integrations
• Implemented both backend and frontend changes for new Alipay-Uber integration
• Enabled Uber in Google Maps with new JWT-based 3rd-party integration

Member of Technical Staff

VMware, Network & Security Business Unit

• Implemented CDO mode IPS mode cluster level API
• Enhanced NSX-V product security for FIPS certification, including upstream (Python) patches
• Implemented CLI and daemon to support Java profiling on NSX-T/V Controllers

Software Engineer Intern

Alibaba Group, Data Technology & Product Division

• Built an Apache Storm and Apache Kafka based large scale realtime crawler, with peak performance of 10M pages/day

Publications

1. Introducing uGroup: Uber’s Consumer Management Platform - Uber Engineering Blog
2. Kafka Async Queuing with Consumer Proxy - Uber Engineering Blog

Education

Master of Science in Electrical & Computer Engineering

Georgia Institute of Technology

Research Assistant, Contributed to DoE ARPA-E with data collection application CommuteWarrior

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Belmont, CA | find.qichao@gmail.com