Hi, I'm Chi!
I'm a software engineer on the Lakebase team at Databricks. Before that, I studied computer science at Shanghai Jiao Tong University and Carnegie Mellon University.
I work on database systems and enjoy explaining how they work. I helped build BusTub, the educational database used in CMU's database course. I also created two courses: mini-lsm, where you build a storage engine from scratch, and tiny-llm, where you build an LLM inference engine.
Fun facts about me
- I go by Chi when there's no other Chi in the room; otherwise, Alex. Chi is pronounced “chee.”
- I speak Mandarin, English, and Shanghainese, plus a little Japanese.
- I started programming at nine. Rust became my favorite language in 2018, and TiKV got me into databases in 2020.
- I helped make CMU’s 15-445 projects more engaging. In Fall 2023, I might accidentally have made them ridiculously hard.
Let's connect
Latest posts
See all posts- Plan Representation: #1 Lesson Learned from Building an Optimizer Let's find out the best plan representation for building an extensible query optimizer.
- Key-Value Separation in LSM Storage Engines In this blog post, we walk through several different implementations of key-value separation in LSM storage engines.
- State Store in Streaming Systems In this blog post, we walk through 3 different design approaches to state stores in streaming systems.
Work experience
See all work- Dec 2025 — PresentDatabricksSoftware Engineer · Bellevue, WA
I got a new title and level and moved to Bellevue, but “Agent Prompter” probably describes what I do better than “Software Engineer.”
- Jun 2025 — Dec 2025DatabricksMember of Technical Staff · Pittsburgh, PA
When Databricks acquired Neon, we got a fancy new name: Lakebase. I kept working on the same storage system.
- Feb 2024 — Jun 2025NeonSystems Software Engineer · Pittsburgh, PA
Worked on Neon’s storage team, mostly on the storage system.
- May 2023 — Aug 2023NeonSoftware Engineering Intern · Pittsburgh, PA
Prototyped tiered compaction and worked on Prisma’s integration with Neon’s serverless SQL driver.