About

Xiao Li is a highly experienced Director of Engineering currently working at Databricks, a company that builds highly technical products that fulfill real and important needs in the world. With over 12 years of relevant experience, Xiao has a proven track record of leading and managing teams for the development of Apache Spark, Databricks Runtime, and DB SQL. At Databricks, he is leading and managing six teams for building the Lakehouse platform, where he majorly focuses on the development of Apache Spark, Databricks Runtime, and DB SQL, including query compiler, SQL features, code generation execution engine, Spark Core, Python APIs (PySpark, Koalas), Spark Connect, federated query engine, data sources/connectors, Spark UX, build, container service, testing/release/deployment, and performance infrastructure. Xiao's group's mission is to build the next generation distributed data processing systems that can outperform specialized SQL query engines in relational query performance, yet provide the expressiveness and programming abstractions to support diverse workloads ranging from ETL to data science. Some of the major projects of his group include Apache Spark, Databricks Runtime, DB SQL, and Infrastructure. Xiao holds a Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) in Computer Engineering from the University of Florida and a BS (& MS) in Computer Science from Nanjing University of Science and Technology. He has a strong technical background in Databricks, Senior Software Engineer, SQL, Spark, infra, test, AI, Data Warehouse, Big Data, Python, Data Scientist, ETL, and Pandas. Xiao is a highly motivated leader who constantly pushes the boundaries of data and AI technology while simultaneously operating with the resilience, security, and scale that is critical to making customers successful on the Databricks platform. He is currently looking to hire talented individuals who share his passion for building highly technical products that fulfill real and important needs in the world.