Ying Zhang

I am Head of Core Networking Systems and Director of Engineering at Meta, where I lead the teams building the software systems behind one of the world's largest wide-area backbone networks — and the AI datacenter fabrics riding on it. 

Over 10+ years of engineering management and 15+ years building network infrastructure, my work has spanned SDN control, traffic engineering, optical networks, and networking for AI. I also lead Meta's networking research engagement with academia, and serve the research community as Program Chairs and Program Committee members.

My research has produced 150+ peer-reviewed publications (8,000+ citations), 2 books, and 160+ patents.

Education

• Ph.D. / M.S., Computer Science and Engineering, University of Michigan (2009 / 2006); 

• B.S., Computer Science, Peking University (2004).

Professional Experience

• Head of Core Networking Systems, Director of Engineering, Meta (2017–present).

• Research Manager, Principal Research Scientist, HP Labs (2014–2017).

• Senior Staff Researcher, Ericsson Research (2009–2012).

Selected Recent Publications

AI Networking

• Closing the Bandwidth Gap in AI Datacenters with Scalable Multicast. Sepehr Abdous, Jinqi Lu, Sana Mahmood, Jiacheng Wan, Alex Minetree Dill, Erfan Sharafzadeh, Ying Zhang, Soudeh Ghorbani. NSDI 2027.

• Phantora: Maximizing Code Reuse in Simulation-based Machine Learning System Performance Estimation. Jianxing Qin, Jingrong Chen, Xinhao Kong, Yongji Wu, Tianjun Yuan, Liang Luo, Zhaodong Wang, Ying Zhang, Tingjun Chen, Alvin R. Lebeck, Danyang Zhuo. NSDI 2026 (Fall).

• Enabling AI Network Cross-Layer Design and Operations with Arcadia: A Simulation Platform at Scale. Zhaodong Wang, Satyajeet Singh Ahuja, Xu Zhang, Yuhui Zhang, Max Noormohammadpour, Gregory R. Steinbrecher, Thomas Fuller, Xin Liu, Kevin Quirk, Mikel Jimenez Fernandez, Abhinav Triguna, Yan Cai, Steve Politis, Petr Lapukhov, Naader Hasani, Ying Zhang. NSDI 2026 (Fall).

• Matryoshka: Realizing Hyperscale Data Center Network Design for the AI Era Yan Cai, Jialong Li, Kutalmis Akpinar, Peter Li, Hany Morsy, Jason Wilson, Sunil Khaunte, Yiting Xia, Ying Zhang NSDI 2026.

• Sparing Strategies to Minimize Reliability Impact On Large Training Jobs. Kevin Quirk, Matthew Lennie, Ehsan Ardestani, Satyajeet Singh Ahuja, Matthew Bergeron, Andrew Grier, Zhaodong Wang, Mustafa Ozdal, Xu Zhang, Abhinav Triguna, Ying Zhang. MLSys 2026.

• Cross-Phase Blending: Why AI Fabrics Need Phase-Aware Transport. Soudeh Ghorbani, Ying Zhang. HotNets 2026.

• One to Many: Closing the Bandwidth Gap in AI Datacenters with Scalable Multicast Sepehr Abdous, Jinqi Lu, Jiacheng Wan, Erfan Sharafzadeh; Ying Zhang; Soudeh Ghorbani HotNets 2025

• MixNet: A Runtime Reconfigurable Optical-Electrical Fabric for Distributed Mixture-of-Experts Training, Xudong Liao, Yijun Sun; Han Tia; Xinchen Wan; Yilun Jin; Zilong Wang, Zhenghang Ren, Xinyang Huang, Wenxue Li; Kin Fai Tse, Zhizhen Zhong, Guyue Liu, Ying Zhang, Xiaofeng Ye, Yiming Zhang, Kai Chen. SIGCOMM 2025.

• Enabling Efficient GPU Communication over Multiple NICs with FuseLink Zhenghang Ren, Yuxuan Li, Zilong Wang, Xinyang HUANG, Wenxue Li, Kaiqiang Xu, Xudong Liao, Yijun Sun, Bowen Liu, Han Tian, Junxue Zhang, Mingfei Wang, Zhizhen Zhong, Guyue Liu, Ying Zhang, and Kai Chen. OSDI 2025.

• Congestion Patterns in a Large-scale RDMA Datacenter Soudeh Ghorbani, Yimeng Zhao, Srikanth Sundaresan, Ying Zhang , Yijing Zeng, Abhigyan Sharma, Prashanth Kannan, Cristian Lumezanu, IMC 2025, Best Paper Award

Backbone & WAN

• Autonomy Without Anarchy in Decentralized WAN Traffic Engineering. Arjun Devraj, Umesh Krishnaswamy, Ying Zhang, Karuna Grewal, Justin Hsu, Eva Tardos, Rachee Singh. NSDI 2027.

• Colt: Handling Traffic Bursts using Piecewise Linear Adaptive Traffic Engineering. Abd AlRhman AlQiam, Danish Athar, Ngoc Do, Ying Zhang, Sanjay G Rao, Bruno Ribeiro, Mohit Tawarmalani. NSDI 2027.

• Express Lane to Efficiency and Reliability: Multi-Dimensional Control in Meta's Express Backbone Network. Faisal Iqbal, Vitaly Neganov, Brian Chang, Rong Rong, Yuanjun Yao, Marek Denis, Qin Zhang, Alexandru Manea, Anton Marchenko, Ulas Kozat, Aditya Akella, Ying Zhang. NSDI 2026 (Fall).

• HEDGE: Mitigating effects of wavelength-specific faults in cloud WANs Arjun Devraj, Bill Owens, Umesh Krishnaswamy, Ying Zhang, Rachee Singh NSDI 2026.

• Achieving Network Efficiency Through Service Collaborative Capacity Sharing and Enforcement. Vinayak Dangui, Alaleh Razmjoo, Guanqing Yan, Mahesh Nayak, Mansi Babbar, Brian Bierig, Tejas Birajdar, Prabhakaran Ganesan, Lilian Liu, Matt Maia, Jerry Yang, Shrinivas Petale, Satyajeet Singh Ahuja, Abhinav Triguna, Guyue (Grace) Liu, Ying Zhang. SIGCOMM 2026.

• PreTE: Traffic Engineering with Predictive Failures Congcong Miao, Zhizhen Zhong, Yiren Zhao, Arpit Gupta, Ying Zhang, Sirui Li, Zekun He, Xianneng Zou, Jilong Wang. SIGCOMM 2025

• Hattrick: Solving Multi-Class TE using Neural Models Zhuocong Li, Satyajeet Singh Ahuja, Zhaodong Wang, Ying Zhang, Sanjay Rao, Bruno Ribeiro, and Mohit Tawarmalani. SIGCOMM 2025.

• Intent-Driven Network Management with Multi-Agent LLMs: The Confucius Framework Zhaodong Wang, Samuel Lin, Guanqing Yan, Soudeh Ghorbani, Minlan Yu, Jiawei Zhou, Nathan Hu, Lopa Baruah, Sam Peters, Srikanth Kamath, Jerry Yang, and Ying Zhang. SIGCOMM 2025.

• Heimdall: Towards Risk-Aware Network Management Outsourcing Yuejie Wang, Qiutong Men, Yongting Chen, Jiajin Liu, Gengyu Chen, Ying Zhang, Guyue Liu, and Vyas Sekar. NDSS 2025.

Datacenter & CDN Systems

• Planogram: A Multi-dimensional Physical Location Planning System for DC Networks. Richard Cziva, Alexander Mafusalov, Shrinivas Petale, Varun Gupta, Abhinav Triguna, Jason Wilson, Manikantan KR, Susana Contrera, Jimmy Williams, Alexey Andreyev, Tian Fang, Satyajeet Singh Ahuja, Ying Zhang. SIGCOMM 2026.

• CacheFlare: Optimizing Cold Content Performance in CDNs. Tiansheng Zhang, YuLing Chen, Ahmed Kamal, Liang Zhou, Jianfeng Tang, Huapeng Zhou, Thilan Ganegedara, Yuhan Guo, Sanjay Sane, Ben Vallis, Theophilus A. Benson, Ying Zhang. SIGCOMM 2026.

• Unlocking Superior Performance in Reconfigurable Data Center Networks with Credit-Based Transport. Federico De Marchi, Jialong Li, Ying Zhang, Wei Bai, Yiting Xia. SIGCOMM 2025

• A Hybrid Route Planning Framework for Large-Scale DCN Migrations Yikai Lin, Mohab Gawish, Shih-Hao Tseng, Lixin Gao, Cen Zhao, John Tracey, Sunyi Shao, Hyojeong Kim and Ying Zhang. SIGCOMM 2025.

• VeriNC: Finding Design Risks of In-Network Computing Systems. Tianyu Bai, Xiaoxi Zhang, Haoqing Wang, Ying Zhang, Wenfei Wu. ICNP 2026.

Full publication list →