Zhongyang Xia

Toronto, ON, Canada · [email protected] · github.com/XIAZY

Skills

Extensive experience with Linux and the *nix toolchain.
Distributed systems built on cloud-native technology — Docker, Kubernetes, and public clouds, chiefly AWS.
Go, Haskell, Python, C, Java, JavaScript, and HDLs like Verilog.
MySQL, Postgres, Redis, and Elasticsearch.
Agile and Git-driven workflows, including incident response, postmortems, and cross-team coordination.

Experience

DevOps Engineer

Primer Labs · Remote Mar 2024 – Present

Built the entire Kubernetes-centric infrastructure on AWS EKS using ArgoCD, Helm, and Kustomize, following GitOps doctrine.
As the first infrastructure hire, owned platform engineering end to end: CI/CD on GitHub Actions, deployments, SRE and on-call incident response with incident.io, observability with OpenTelemetry, and internal automation.
Delivered SOC 2 Type II readiness and continuous compliance — RBAC for legacy services, VPN and Zero Trust access, and Vanta remediation workflows that closed vulnerability and control-gap findings within SLA.
Developed cost-efficient, large-scale ETL and data integration pipelines with ClickHouse Cloud and Prefect, alongside OSS components (Airbyte, DuckDB), improving performance while controlling spend.

Software Engineer

Zeet Inc · Remote Jun 2023 – Feb 2024

Led full-stack development of core features of Zeet's Kubernetes DevOps platform, including ephemeral debugging containers and Helm resource detection.
Strengthened the cluster provisioning pipeline with Go, Kubernetes, Terraform, and Helm, exposing GraphQL APIs to create and tear down clusters in public clouds while preserving data security.
Improved the robustness of the platform's job execution with new deploy pipelines, providing APIs for Kubernetes CRUD operations with carbon-footprint accounting per step.

Software Engineer

Wish · Toronto, ON May 2021 – Jun 2023

Built a centralized Protobuf depot and publishing pipeline to manage, compile, and distribute protobufs company-wide, standardizing internal APIs and removing manual builds for every team.
Owned Wish's microservice creation platform, shipping one-click Kubernetes microservice launches with consistent defaults.
Modernized legacy monoliths with Kubernetes and Envoy service-mesh patterns, improving security, network transparency, and maintainability.
Revamped Eventmaster (open source), paying down tech debt and migrating it to a cloud-native stack — Kubernetes, serverless databases, dynamic load balancing — improving SLA and user experience.
Created a Go template for AWS SQS workers with metrics and tracing built in, letting teams ship offline job processors without reinventing the plumbing.

Research Intern

Microsoft Research · Remote Sep 2020 – Jan 2021

Contributed to research on an AI-optimized congestion control algorithm as a member of the Networking Research Group.
Led the revitalization of AlphaRTC, Microsoft's proof of concept for AI-optimized congestion control, through extensive debugging and porting across operating systems so platforms could collect metrics safely and comparably.
Provided a gym environment for an inter-university congestion control contest, letting researchers collect network traces and evaluate models easily.

Software Engineer Intern

Google · Mountain View, CA Feb – May 2019

Designed and implemented a widely requested internal tool for bulk data changes using Java, Protobuf, gRPC, and Guice, letting users update database entries by submitting serialized protocol buffers to a version control depot.
Deployed it on BorgCron as a hosted, automated service, cutting user preparation time from hours of script-writing to about half an hour.

Education

Honours Bachelor of Science

University of Toronto 2016 – 2021

Specialist in Computer Science. Graduated with Distinction.

Patents

Xia, Zhongyang. 2021. Acquisition methods, terminal and the computer readable storage medium of video thumbnails. CN Patent CN109325145A, filed 2018, granted Oct 12, 2021.