Haoyu Zhai
Senior Software Development Engineer at Uber
Sunnyvale, California, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolHaoyu Zhai is a Senior Software Development Engineer with nine years of experience building and optimizing search systems, currently based in Sunnyvale and working at Uber. He has deep expertise in Lucene-based search, evidenced by contributions to Apache Lucene—improving interval query logic and adding deterministic index tooling—and leadership roles as a Lucene Committer and PMC member. Haoyu has driven search performance improvements at Amazon and progressed to senior engineering roles at LinkedIn before joining Uber, blending low-level search internals with production-scale delivery. He holds a Master’s in Computer Science from UIUC and a multicontinental academic background, reflecting both rigorous training and adaptability. A less obvious strength is his focus on deterministic indexing and reproducible search behavior, which helps teams build more reliable, debuggable search platforms.
9 years of coding experience
6 years of employment as a software developer
Australian National University中学 N/A, 中学 N/A at Beijing No.4 High SchoolMaster's degree Computer Science, Master's degree Computer Science at University of Illinois Urbana-ChampaignThe University of Melbourne
Github Skills (10)
algorithm10
data-structures10
javas10
algorithms10
search-engine10
information-retrieval10
data-structure10
java10
searching9
backend9
Programming languages (6)
Github contributions (5)
apache/lucene
Mar 2023 - Mar 2023
Apache Lucene open-source search software
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:294 reviews, 2 commits, 82 PRs in 1 day
Contributions summary:Haoyu contributed to the Apache Lucene project by addressing issues related to interval queries and index deterministic tools. Their work involved modifications to the core interval query logic, including changes to the `IntervalIterator`, and implementing behavior related to advancing positions. Furthermore, they contributed to a new tool for deterministic index creation. These changes demonstrate a focus on improving search functionality and index management within the Lucene search engine.
lucenesearchnosqljavabackend
zhaih/lucene
May 2021 - Sep 2025
Apache Lucene open-source search software
Contributions:155 pushes, 29 branches in 4 years 4 months
lucene
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.