Nathan Zhao

Trading Desk Operations Engineering

• Deliver customer service at student-run coffee shop in Houston hosting up to 5,000 weekly transactions and serving a wide variety of drinks and food alongside teams of up to 5 per shift and 55 employees overall • Track, manage, and replenish supplies from inventory stock valued at up to $15,000 • Maintain high standards of care in handling food and beverages per Texas Health Code guidelines, including daily sanitation practices and semesterly deep cleans • Coordinate and execute campus catering orders in collaboration with management, including recipe preparation, order fulfillment, delivery, and client communication; adapt to last-minute requests while ensuring quality and timeliness

• Mentored 200+ students in Python and advanced algorithms, both in class and in office hours, directly improving their project performance and code quality • Translated complex computational theory (e.g. graph-searching algorithms) into intuitive solutions for students • Taught students to resolve complex code issues by applying systematic debugging and root cause analysis

• Streamlined SaaS engineering workflows by shipping a full-stack internal tool, integrated with GitLab CI pipelines, shipped with Docker, to interface with AWS EC2 instances within a Kubernetes (EKS) cluster • Democratized information and enabled on-call servicing for 85% of previously unauthorized engineers by implementing REST APIs in a React-based application to manage relational databases with MySQL • Regulated access within the tool in response to expanded features by managing Istio authorization policies • Contributed within an Agile (Scrum) framework by utilizing Jira for task tracking and prioritization, and engaging in sprint planning, retrospectives, and code reviews to align with release cycles and code standards

• Helped students visualize ascent dynamics for over 200 invited students by developing interactive coding environments with autograders and engineering a rocket propulsion simulator, both written in C++ • Abstracted algorithm implementation for over 200 invited students by building simplified custom machine learning libraries in Python to streamline student learning processes

• Supported Women’s Basketball team to reach the NCAA Division I Basketball Tournament (March Madness) by applying comprehensive machine learning models to 300+ basketball data sets in Python and forming visualizations using Seaborn to communicate essential conclusions on player performance & team dynamics

• Examined, in an educational role, the utilization of machine learning algorithms in integrated RASP (Runtime Application Self Protection) software in client applications to actively defend and respond to network-based attacks

• Explored, in an educational role under Cloud Architect Karl Smayling, software engineering, sales engineering, cloud architecture, and Google Cloud solutions to gain insights on how Google executes organizational transformations that fuel innovation, enable agility, and maximize ROI