MIKE XIAOSYS.VER: 0.9.4
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What matters to me most in technology is whether it is genuinely useful in people's lives — whether it helps people live better, decide better, or build better.

My work spans both large-scale infrastructure and consumer product development, from distributed systems at AWS DynamoDB to full-stack, experiment-driven product work at Meta. Across both, I am drawn to problems where strong engineering, product judgment, and real human usefulness converge.

Experience Log

Software Engineer Current

Meta Platforms, Inc. / Facebook
Feb 2025 — Present

Led 0→1 product development for Facebook Friends Tab, a top-level surface serving 20M–25M+ daily active users in US/CA, spanning full-stack execution, experimentation, and AI-native workflow design.

Product Strategy & High-Scale Impact
  • 0→1 Consumer Features: Led multiple consumer-facing features from concept to production, owning architecture, full-stack implementation, experimentation strategy, and launch iteration across ambiguous product spaces.
  • Quantifiable Growth Engineering: Directed experimentation strategies that delivered +5.2% 0s DAU and +7.8% high-quality social interactions, significantly improving overall Friends Tab engagement metrics.
AI-Native Systems & Workflows
  • Agentic Developer Ecosystems: Spearheaded the integration of AI-driven development into core workflows, establishing a "prototype-first" model that reduced average prototype latency for In-Feed Units from ~2 weeks to 2 days.
  • AI-Native Tooling Orchestration: Engineered a suite of internal agentic systems, including a domain-aware Code Review Assistant for quality and risk review and an Experiment Assistant interpreting 200+ metrics to accelerate launch decisions.
  • Knowledge-Centric Architectures: Developed a specialized Friends Tab knowledge layer and agentic frameworks that compressed idea-to-experiment cycles by >50%, doubling concurrent feature development capacity.
  • Organizational AI-Driven Impact: Authored and evangelized internal frameworks on AI-native engineering and modern development that were adopted by leadership and scaled across broader working groups.
Technical Leadership & Strategic Influence
  • Strategic Roadmap Ownership: Authored multi-quarter strategy documents and comprehensive lookback analyses that defined the long-term technical and product direction for the Friends Tab.
  • Cross-Functional Impact: Collaborated with PM, Design, and Data Scientist to evaluate high-stakes trade-offs between experimentation velocity and system stability, ensuring alignment on technical priorities.
  • Evangelizing Engineering Standards: Established and scaled internal frameworks for AI-native development, influencing leadership to adopt agentic paradigms and modern engineering standards across broader product groups.
  • Decision-Making Under Ambiguity: Led technical evaluations for 0→1 product surfaces, navigating complex architectural requirements to deliver scalable solutions for high-traffic consumer features.

Software Dev Engineer

Amazon Web Services, Inc. / DynamoDB
Jul 2020 — Feb 2025

Built large-scale infrastructure for Amazon DynamoDB, driving reliability, scaling, and traffic management across a global storage fleet.

Large-Scale Distributed Systems & Reliability
  • GAC for DynamoDB Global Table MRSC (Tech Lead, Q4 2024): Architected and implemented Global Admission Control integration for Multi-Region Strong Consistency, enabling robust cross-region traffic management, accurate metering and billing, and zero-RPO support for DynamoDB Global Tables.
  • High-Consequence Traffic Protection: Designed and launched "Split-For-Heat" protection mechanisms to mitigate unexpected throttling during rapid traffic surges, ensuring seamless scaling for Tier-0 customers.
  • Fail-Safe Automation Design: Engineered a fail-open strategy for global admission control to preserve service continuity during critical CloudWatch outages, maintaining safe traffic admission without active autoscaling signals
Technical Leadership & Operational Excellence
  • Region Build Automation (Cross-Team Tech Lead, Q4 2023 - Q2 2024): Architected the end-to-end automated infrastructure deployment for new AWS region launches for DynamoDB Core Storage as part of a top-level AWS strategic initiative. Led development of automated service builds for Storage Plane, Global Admission Control (GAC), and Global Fleet Health Service, reducing total build time from 2.5 months to 3 weeks (a 70% reduction).
  • Global Fleet Observability (Tech Lead, Q1–Q3 2023): Led development of a fleet health service monitoring infrastructure health across 250,000 storage nodes globally, and expanded the system across all 37 AWS commercial regions to improve visibility and operational response at worldwide scale.
  • DynamoDB Heat Insight (Co-Lead, Q3 2023): Co-led the design of a heat-insight service generating historical traffic heatmaps, reducing operational overhead by enabling engineers to diagnose complex throttling issues via automated data visualization

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Software Engineer Intern
New York Life / Cloud Services
Jun 2019 — Aug 2019
Software Engineer, Gameplay
Forest Games / Beijing
Jun 2017 — Aug 2018

System Specs

Skills.sh
Languages
Java, Python, JavaScript, C#, PHP
Product & Full-Stack
React, experimentation, analytics instrumentation, 0→1 feature delivery
Systems
Distributed architecture, reliability engineering, REST APIs, traffic management
Cloud & Infra
AWS, DynamoDB, Lambda, API Gateway, CloudFormation, CI/CD
AI-Native
AI-assisted development, agentic workflows, rapid prototyping
Hardware Setup (Edu)

Southern Methodist Univ.

M.S. in Computer Science
2018 — 2020

Michigan State Univ.

B.S. in Computer Science
2013 — 2018

Data Streams

Input: Blog