About
I’m Yifan (Ethan) Zhao, a software engineer interested in distributed systems, databases, and infrastructure. I’m currently pursuing my Master of Science in Software Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University, based in Mountain View, CA. This summer (May–August 2026) I’ll be joining Stripe in South San Francisco as a Software Engineering Intern on the Security team.
Education Link to heading
I earned my B.S. in Computer Science (Specialist) with a Minor in Mathematics from the University of Toronto (2020–2025), graduating with a 3.93/4.0 GPA and four years on the Dean’s List. I represented the school at ICPC, taking 12th place at the 2024 regional contest. I’m now at Carnegie Mellon University for my M.S. in Software Engineering (2025–2026).
Experience Link to heading
Before Stripe, I spent the summer of 2025 at Micro Fun in Beijing as a backend SWE intern, where I built a real-time observability system for the mobile game Gossip Harbor (20M+ downloads) and overhauled the team’s CI/CD toolchain to cut build time meaningfully. Earlier, I spent over a year at Huawei Technologies Canada (2023–2024) working in C++ on GaussDB, their distributed relational database — tuning the disaster-recovery system, migrating advanced SQL features, and implementing write-ahead logging for HTAP workloads.
For the full timeline with metrics and details, see my Resume (PDF).