Ruowang (Jackie) Zhang
Tech Lead Manager · Staff Research Engineer · AI Data Systems
EXPERIENCE
Contextual AI
Tech Lead Manager / Staff Research Engineer — AI Data Systems
Jul 2025 – Present · Mountain View, CA
- TLM of the data platform team, owning the large-scale multimodal document parsing, embedding and indexing pipeline, as well as the underlying vector search and model inference infra
- Supporting the research team to co-design advanced tools for dynamic and agentic index building and exploration
- Collaborating on building and evaluating in-house SOTA AI models (parsing, embedding, reranking, GLM) to maximize end-to-end RAG performance
Databricks
Senior Software Engineer — Distributed Data Systems
Aug 2021 – Jul 2025 · Mountain View, CA
- One of the top contributors to the open-source Delta Lake storage format, and a contributor to Apache Spark
- Built core abstractions for cost-free schema updates (column mapping) in Delta Lake tables
- Tech lead of schema inference/evolution & file-source connector across multiple ingestion product surfaces; engineered solutions ingesting O(100) PBs/month
Reactive.xyz
Founder — Web & App Development Studio
Jan 2015 – Present · Melbourne / Remote
- Managed up to 5 student developers from Australia and the US using an agile workflow
- Led and delivered 20+ web/app projects to production — see reactive.xyz
EDUCATION
Purdue University
Doctor of Engineering (D.Eng) — Part-time / Online
Research: Agentic LLM with RL, Multimodal knowledge representation & retrieval · Advised by Prof. Jing Gao
May 2025 – Present
Columbia University
M.S., Computer Science — Machine Learning Track
GPA: 4.07 · Columbia Video Network (Part-time / Online)
May 2021 – Feb 2024 · Remote
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
B.S., Computer Science & Data Science
GPA: 3.765 · Summa Cum Laude · James B. Angell Scholar · Research with Prof. Mao, Prof. Koutra, Prof. Mozafari
Sep 2016 – May 2020 · Ann Arbor, MI
SKILLS
LANGUAGES
C++ · Java · Scala · Python · Go
Swift · Obj-C · P4 · SQL · TypeScript
DATA & ML
Spark · Hadoop · Delta Lake · Kafka
TensorFlow · PyTorch · RAG / LLMs
MySQL · Mongo · Cassandra · Redis
FRAMEWORKS & INFRA
Spring · Django · React · Vue
Docker · Kubernetes
AWS · GCP · Azure
GET IN TOUCH
Open to interesting problems in data systems, AI infrastructure, and applied ML.