Zijian ZhangZijian Zhang

01.About Me

I'm a Linux kernel and cloud-networking engineer based in Santa Clara, CA. I spend most of my time inside the Linux networking stack and Cilium's dataplane, and I'm an upstream contributor to the kernel's sockmap/tcp_bpf subsystem.

Here are a few technologies I work with day to day:

  • ▹Linux Kernel
  • ▹eBPF
  • ▹Cilium / Kubernetes
  • ▹C / C++ / Go
  • ▹bpftrace / pwru
  • ▹Python / Shell
  • ▹Docker / containerd
  • ▹libbpf / BCC
  • Columbia University in the City of New York
    M.S. in Computer Science, Columbia University in the City of New York · Sep 2021 – Dec 2022
  • Wuhan University
    B.S. in Computer Science, Wuhan University · Sep 2016 – Jul 2020

02.Open Source Contributions

Linux Kernel

Linux Kernel sockmap & tcp_bpf

16 patches merged · view history

  • ▹Fixed memory leak, charging bugs, and race conditions in eBPF skmsg helper functions.
  • ▹Authored test coverage for eBPF sockmap redirection and fixed OOM issues in the msg_zerocopy self-tests.
Cilium

Cilium datapath

4 patches merged · view history

03.Work Experience

ByteDance Inc.

Cloud Network Engineer @ ByteDance Inc.

San Jose, USA · Feb 2023 – Present

  • ▹Architected and maintained container/VM/Baremetal networking for ByteDance's global infrastructure — 10,000+ servers across 100+ self-built PoPs on custom-built Cilium and KubeVirt.
  • ▹Designed the Linux kernel patchset tcp_bpf: improve ingress redirection with message corking
  • ▹Led global Cilium CNI rollouts and resolved critical production network outages while maintaining high-availability SLAs.
ByteDance Inc.

Linux Kernel Engineer Intern @ ByteDance Inc.

New York, USA · May 2022 – Aug 2022

  • ▹Built a low-latency backpressure feedback loop over virtio/net shared memory to expose host-side congestion to guest VMs.
  • ▹Reduced packet drop rate from 44% to 3% via vhost/virtio-net extensions and guest-side socket throttling.
Columbia University in the City of New York

Teaching Assistant, Operating Systems @ Columbia University in the City of New York

New York, USA · Aug 2022 – Dec 2022

  • ▹Held office hours and graded assignments covering processes, threads, synchronization, virtual memory, and file systems.
Terapines

Compiler Engineer @ Terapines

Wuhan, China · Aug 2020 – May 2021

  • ▹Implemented instruction codegen for 50+ proprietary GAP8
  • ▹Built a custom LLVM backend pass to reduce instruction count and register pressure in dynamic allocation.
View Full Résumé

04.Publications & Talks