Chien-Chia Chen, Ph.D. in CS, UCLA

BIO


I am a Staff Software Engineer at Google. Prior to Google, I was a Staff Engineer II in VMware's I/O Performance team, under which I was the founding and lead engineer of the VMware Performance Analytics team. Following data mesh paradigm, my team aims to break the functional silos among product dev/ops teams, data scientist teams, and ML/data engineering teams. My team owned and developed data/ML solutions end-to-end. We developed and operated our own data/ML platform to serve these data/ML services including real-time proactive anomaly detection, performance analysis and optimizations, regression tracking, monitoring and alerting, sizing recommendations, and automatic hardware certification. Our data/ML solutions saved millions of operational costs every year. My team also had strong presence in many top industry conferences such as Data-Centric AI Workshop at NeurIPS '21 and USENIX OpML '20. Under my leadership, we have tripled the size of the Performance Analytics team in 5 years.

My work at VMware also included analyzing and optimizing storage and networking performance for VMware products including vSphere, vSAN, and NSX. My past project spans across multiple areas including vSphere NetQueue's low-latency support, load balancing algorithms, performance tuning, and large-scale performance analytics; VMware NSX-MH datapath; vSphere APIs for IO Filtering (VAIO); vSphere Storage DRS (SDRS). I was also the lead developer of VMware I/O Analyzer, which has become a popular tool to benchmark vSAN performance and is the second most downloaded VMware fling tools in 2013-2015 (and has been in top 10 for years). Prior to joining VMware, I went to UCLA for my doctoral study under the supervision of Prof. Mario Gerla and Prof. Medy Sanadidi. I received my Ph.D. in CS and M.S. in CS degrees from UCLA in 2012 and 2009 respectively. Before I moved to LA for graduate study, I spent five years in National Tsing Hua University (NTHU), Hsinchu, Taiwan, where I got my B.S. in CS degree in 2006 and worked as a full-time Research Assistant with Prof. Wen-Tsuen Chen and Prof. Jyh-Cheng Chen for a year. I also served as a voluntary developer of WIRE1x in my last year in NTHU.

AWARDS AND RECOGNITIONS

  • VMware 2021 EPIC2 Achievement Award (8 recipients out of 30,000+ employees)

  • VMware 2015 Top Talent (81 recipients out of 12,000+ employees)

  • Strong presence in industry conferences

  • Strong presence in VMware’s highly-competitive internal annual R&D conference

    • 2021: 3 research talks (two 1st author and one co-author) (~30 / ~400 accepted; 7% acceptance)

    • 2020: 1 research poster (co-author) (~90 / ~700 accepted; 14% acceptance)

    • 2019: 1 research poster (co-author) (~90 / ~600 accepted; 16% acceptance)

    • 2017: 2 research posters (co-author) (~60 / ~500 accepted; 12% acceptance)

    • 2016: 1 research poster (1st author) (~60 / ~400 accepted; 15% acceptance)

    • 2015: 1 paper accepted as research talk (1st author) (~30 / ~400 accepted; 7% acceptance)

SKILLS AND EXPERTISE

  • Strong technical leadership / mentorship and inter-personal skills

Hands-On Technical Experience

  • Kubernetes, Micro-Services, FastAPI, OpenAPI

  • Machine Learning, Machine Learning Engineering and Operations, Machine Learning and Data Platform

  • Natural Language Processing, Machine Reasoning, Data Analytics

  • Highly Available Distributed Storage Systems

  • Virtualized I/O Devices, Networking Virtualization, Kernel Programming on Linux and VMware ESXi

  • System / Distributed System Performance Analysis and Optimization

Programming Languages

  • Python, C, C++: 10+ years of exp.

  • Java: 4+ years of exp.

  • Other PL's with basic familiarity: JavaScript, Golang, BASH, PHP, SQL

WORK EXPERIENCE

  • Staff Software Engineer, Google Inc., Sunnyvale, CA, U.S.A, June 2022-Present.

  • Staff Engineer II, VMware Inc., Palo Alto, CA, U.S.A, August 2018-June 2022.

  • Staff Engineer, VMware Inc., Palo Alto, CA, U.S.A, July 2015-July 2018.

  • Senior Member of Technical Staff, VMware Inc., Palo Alto, CA, U.S.A, July 2013-June 2015.

  • Member of Technical Staff, VMware Inc., Palo Alto, CA, U.S.A, July 2012-June 2013.

  • MTS Intern, VMware Inc., Palo Alto, CA, U.S.A, June 2011-September 2011.

  • Software Engineering Intern, Google Inc., Mountain View, CA, U.S.A, June 2010-September 2010.

  • Teaching Assistant, University of California Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA, U.S.A.

    • Spring 2012, CS133, Parallel and Distributed Computing (Evaluation)

    • Winter 2012, CS111, Operating Systems Principles

    • Spring 2011, CS133, Parallel and Distributed Computing

    • Winter 2011, CS31, Introduction to Computer Science I

    • Fall 2010, CS31, Introduction to Computer Science I

  • Graduate Student Researcher, University of California Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA, U.S.A, December 2009-June 2010.

  • Graduate Intern, Utopia Compression Corp., Los Angeles, CA, U.S.A., March 2009-August 2009.

  • Research Assistant, Computer and Communication Research Center, National Tsing Hua University, Hsinchu, Taiwan, July 2006-June 2007.

EDUCATION

  • Ph.D., Computer Science Dept., University of California Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA, U.S.A., September 2009-June 2012.

  • Master of Science, Computer Science Dept., University of California Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA, U.S.A., September 2007-June 2009.

  • Bachelor of Science, Dept. of Computer Science, National Tsing Hua University, Hsinchu, Taiwan, September 2002-June 2006.

PUBLICATIONS

CURRICULUM PROJECTS

REFERENCES

AVAILABLE UPON REQUEST.

LINKS