About
I'm Todd Zheng, a senior software engineer and tech lead based in Bothell, Washington. I work on AI engineering tools, release platforms, and developer productivity.
I grew up in a household where technology was always around, and I started young — hacking games, figuring out how to make pirated copies run, and generally taking things apart to see how they worked. I graduated from UC San Diego in 2017 with a degree in Mathematics and Computer Science.
What I do
At TikTok, I was the founding engineer of Ouroboros, Global E-Commerce's unified release platform. Built from scratch, it now manages release workflows for ~5,000 services across ~4,000 engineers — handling approval, compliance, observability, quality gates, scheduling, and rollback, with an NPS of 85.
I also built Ticket Stamper, which aggregates compliance approvals and reuses eligible test-environment results, cutting org-wide approval volume by ~80%.
Before TikTok, I spent five years at Google, where I worked on early proof-of-concepts for Google's low-code platform initiative (which informed the AppSheet acquisition), Apigee SSO (OAuth, RBAC, multi-tenancy), and catastrophic recovery for Google Core infrastructure.
AI Engineering
Recently I've been building LLM agents with RAG, tool calling, persistent memory, and eval loops — applied to the messy, undersolved parts of engineering work: debugging, cross-timezone handoffs, release reviews, and team knowledge management.
My personal developer agent, built on the open-source Hermes framework, is used daily by me and 10+ teammates. It combines layered memory, persistent notes, team SOPs, and custom tools to handle platform-wide Q&A and guided debugging across a 20-repo ownership area.
Tech Stack
- Languages: Go, Java, Python
- Systems: Distributed systems, CI/CD, release platforms, developer experience
- AI: LLM agents, RAG, tool calling, persistent memory, evals
- Infrastructure: Kubernetes, Docker, MySQL, Redis, RocketMQ
Outside of work
I started playing World of Warcraft seriously in 2019. I've been a raid leader, earned Cutting Edge multiple times, and pushed high Mythic+ keys. These days I play casually — the game taught me more about how to think and how to work with people than I expected from a twenty-year-old MMO.
I live with my wife and four cats. They contribute to my code reviews by walking on the keyboard.