SAN MATEO, CALIFORNIA

Ziwen Cao.

Staff Software Engineer
AI Infrastructure & Distributed Systems

I own AI serving infrastructure for ByteDance / TikTok’s Large Vision Model platform, spanning model deployment, workflow orchestration, and scheduling.

Ziwen Cao outdoors in the mountains
CURRENT WORKBYTEDANCE / TIKTOK

AI infrastructure
at ByteDance.

Serving infrastructure for generative vision models, from research handoff to production.

Serving platform · 1,000+ QPS

vLLM · CUDA · ComfyUI

AIGC serving architecture

I own workflow orchestration and scheduling, with a focus on improving GPU utilization.

For an asynchronous AIGC serving framework, I make architecture decisions, coordinate work across teams, and work with users and leadership on adoption and project funding.

Model deployment and serving

I deploy and serve models including Seedance and Seedream, alongside open-weight models such as Qwen and MiniMax H3.

Mentorship and coding agents

I mentor engineers and help teams adopt coding agent workflows. I also use agents to automate repetitive engineering work.

EXPERIENCE2015 — PRESENT

Experience.

CURRENTLY

ByteDance / TikTok

JAN 2026 — PRESENT

Staff Software Engineer · AI Infrastructure

Infrastructure owner for the Large Vision Model platform. AIGC serving, orchestration, scheduling, and model deployment with vLLM and CUDA.

AI InfraModel ServingTechnical Leadership

Meta

APR 2024 — DEC 2025

Senior Software Engineer · Reality Labs Payment Risk

Led a cross-functional CVV initiative for Reality Labs purchases. Built payment risk systems for Reality Labs’ app store, including fraud detection, real-time anomaly detection, and rate limiting.

Applied MLReality Labs App StoreReal-time Systems

Airbnb

APR 2017 — MAR 2024

Software Engineer → Senior Software Engineer

Architected foundational SOA services for Airbnb’s move from a monolith to microservices, built a Kafka-based pub-sub system, and managed critical services including Dynamic Configuration.

Led the integration of ChatGPT into Airbnb’s customer support chatbot platform. Also worked across search, advertising, and recommendations.

Distributed SystemsBackend InfrastructureKafka / SOALLM Chatbots

Zenefits

FEB 2016 — APR 2017

Full Stack Software Engineer

Helped build and launch an internal insurance platform.

Amazon Web Services

JUN 2015 — AUG 2015

Software Development Engineer Intern · Amazon EMR

Designed and built a web-based tool to automate log analysis for Amazon EMR.

ABOUTENGINEERING BACKGROUND

From backend systems
to AI infrastructure.

I’ve architected foundational services at Airbnb and led a cross-functional CVV initiative at Meta. Today I own AI serving infrastructure at ByteDance / TikTok.

The common thread is production engineering: how services are deployed, coordinated, and kept reliable at scale.

Outside work, I study model serving with vLLM and SGLang, including continuous batching and KV caching. I also practice operator fusion with OpenAI’s Triton and explore CUDA Graphs.

BASED IN

San Mateo, California

EDUCATION

USC · M.S. in Computer Science

TECHNICAL BACKGROUND

vLLM · CUDA · PyTorch · Triton

GET IN TOUCH

For opportunities in AI infrastructure, model serving, or distributed systems, connect with me on LinkedIn.