Donald Chai
Software Engineer at Google
San Francisco, California, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolDonald Chai is a seasoned software engineer with 17 years of experience building performant, practical tools and systems from low-level libraries to large-scale products. Based in San Francisco, he has been at Google since 2016 and previously spent six years improving static analysis at Synopsys/Coverity, bringing a strong background in finding real bugs with fewer false positives. His open-source work includes optimizing ZIP handling in Android's system core (libziparchive), highlighting a knack for low-level performance tuning that reduces size and improves runtime behavior. Trained as an electrical engineer at Cornell and with a Ph.D. in EECS from UC Berkeley, he blends deep academic rigor with hands-on engineering and a history of accelerating EDA tooling as an intern early in his career. Colleagues rely on him to turn complex, system-level problems into reliable, efficient tooling that impacts production users.
18 years of coding experience
6 years of employment as a software developer
Ph.D., Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Ph.D., Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at University of California, BerkeleyBS, Electrical Engineering, BS, Electrical Engineering at Cornell University
Chinese
Github Skills (8)
c-language10
lib10
zip-archive10
cprogramming-language10
7zip10
performance-optimization10
android10
zip10
Programming languages (5)
Github contributions (5)
aosp-mirror/platform_system_core
Jul 2019 - Jul 2019
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:7 commits in 22 days
Contributions summary:Donald's contributions primarily focus on optimizing ZIP file handling within the Android system core. They have made changes to the `libziparchive` library to avoid using data descriptors when possible, reducing file size and improving performance. Additionally, the user integrated these changes across several commits, ensuring that the changes don't break the main system functionality. These efforts demonstrate a focus on performance optimization and low-level system library improvements.
donaldchai/glide
Apr 2025 - May 2025
An image loading and caching library for Android focused on smooth scrolling
Contributions:13 pushes, 6 branches in 1 month
Find and Hire Top DevelopersWe’ve analyzed the programming source code of over 60 million software developers on GitHub and scored them by 50,000 skills. Sign-up on Prog,AI to search for software developers.