About

Lei Zhang is a Platform Architect at Facebook, leading the PaaS strategy for Live/VOD products, including Live Streaming, Video On demand, copyright detection, video comprehension, video infrastructure, and 3rd party communities. He has over 14 years of experience in the tech industry, specializing in Live Streaming, Video, Cloud platform, Cloud services, Distributed System, Large scale Database, SQL, Distributed Storage Systems, Server Applications, Restful service, and Project Management. Prior to Facebook, Lei spent seven years at Microsoft handling the challenges of high scalability, availability, and reliability in Azure (cloud computing), Bing (search engine), and ICE (mobile service). Lei started his career with Microsoft in 2008 after receiving his master's degree in Computer Science from the Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences. Before that, he studied at the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) for his main bachelor's degree in Computer Science. At Facebook, Lei is responsible for incubating and growing the Facebook Live/Video Platform from scratch. He defined the "Platform as a Service" strategy and architecture for the end-to-end pipeline to handle the tech challenges of availability, reliability, and latency at Facebook scale. Lei is also responsible for building an open ecosystem with external partners, evaluating industry tech companies for potential acquisition, and managing product and infrastructure for Video/Live streaming/Game Streaming/Feed. Additionally, he oversees video comprehension/understanding (Machine learning algorithm + Infra), copyright detection system (audio/video), video fingerprinting, and 3rd party acquisition/ecosystem/partnership. Lei's past experience includes working as a Dev Manager at Microsoft, where he led a team to incubate a project from scratch that aimed to provide a PaaS for mobile apps and utilize the power of the cloud to authorize, publish, store, search, retrieve, and analyze mobile user data in hundreds of millions of users scale. He also worked as a Dev Lead at Microsoft, where he built the new cloud deployment infrastructure to support all Microsoft online businesses, like Azure, Bing, office365, Xbox live, etc. Lei's education includes a master's degree in Distributed System from the Chinese Academy of Sciences and a bachelor's degree in Computer Science from the University of Science and Technology of China. Lei's technical expertise includes Senior Software Engineer, Mobile, infra, SQL, Search, Azure, ML, Android, MongoDB, and iOS.