Hi, I'm James — a backend engineer with 10+ years building large-scale distributed systems and data-intensive platforms. Now expanding into Data Engineering and AI through post-graduate study in Winnipeg, Canada.
$ whoami
huzhi.zhao — backend & data engineer
$ years_experience
10+
$ currently
Post-Grad AI Diploma @ University
of Winnipeg
$ status
Open to new opportunities▌Languages, frameworks, and platforms I've used to build distributed systems and data platforms.
A couple of projects showing how I take systems from raw data to production.
A hands-on, production-style data engineering project I built solo: a lakehouse pipeline that ingests NYC 311 requests, collisions, and weather data through Bronze/Silver/Gold layers to generate daily Operational Load Scores and resource-allocation recommendations per borough.
Delivered an end-to-end Manufacturing Execution System for Shanghai ZHONGYOU TIPO Steel Pipe Co., Ltd. as an independent contractor — real-time machine status monitoring, staff attendance & shift tracking, a production big-data dashboard, and a companion Android app for floor workers.
🔒 Confidential client deployment — source and live access are private.
A few of the systems I've designed, scaled, and shipped to production.
Co-architected core optimizations for a distributed Elasticsearch platform indexing 60M+ products across a 32-node cluster, resolving critical write failures via routing and shard-rebalancing redesign.
Scaled a Kafka-based ingestion pipeline to ~10K writes/sec, cutting data latency from 1–2 hours to under 30 minutes while driving throughput to its physical QPS limit.
Improved query performance to support 500K+ QPS through Redis caching, hot/cold data separation, and query optimization across a large product index.
Designed a metadata-driven rule engine inspired by Salesforce Flow, letting non-technical users define event-driven business processes for a SaaS platform serving 40,000+ automotive businesses.
A summary of my professional journey across backend and data engineering roles.
Formal education and certifications supporting my move into data and AI engineering.
Post-Graduate Diploma in Artificial Intelligence
PACE program — applying backend engineering experience to AI platform development, MLOps, and applied data science.
B.Eng. Mechanical Design, Manufacturing & Automation
Coursera
Databricks