Xuanqi Li
Sunnyvale, CA 94089 | 408.406.8721 | lixuanqi1995@gmail.com
Education
Northeastern University
09/2018 – 12/2019
- M.S. Information Systems, concentrating in Computer Software Engineering, GPA 3.89
Work Experience
Airtable, Senior Software Engineer
04/2024 – Present
- Airtable is a no-code platform for building custom databases and workflows with a spreadsheet-like interface. My team is responsible for improving application vertical scalability, a critical initiative that grew from 6 to 14 engineers since I joined.
- Core contributor to in-house relational database built from scratch, implementing cascading deletion system for removeModel operations (DROP TABLE with FK/relationship cleanup), consolidating Rust-TypeScript interop protocols for 30% improved data exchange performance, and optimizing cold-load performance through deferred index statistics
- Orchestrated seamless migration from legacy in-memory systems to new relational database architecture, designing dual-write strategy to gradually migrate data and business logic without service disruption
- Led multi-quarter re-architecture of Node.js request processing framework from single-threaded to multi-threaded implementation, delivering significant throughput improvements for high-concurrency workloads
- Enhanced team productivity by configuring Rust-analyzer integration with custom Bazel build system, enabling full IDE support (auto-completion, linting, error detection) for Rust development
LinkedIn, Senior Software Engineer
08/2021 – 04/2024
- Owned end-to-end backend development for LinkedIn Pages admin experience, empowering 67M+ businesses to manage company presence and analyze follower engagement
- Collaborated with cross-functional teams (PM, Design, Marketing, Support) and platform teams (Premium, Feed, Invitations, Infrastructure) to deliver weekly analytics notifications, page-to-page following, invitation credits, competitor analytics, and dashboard redesign
- Built Java APIs and Spark data pipelines integrating with internal NoSQL databases (document, graph, time-series) for real-time insights and batch processing
- Pioneered Server Driven UI (SDUI) architecture adoption, reducing feature development time by 67% and eliminating mobile app releases for UI changes
- Productivity Working Group initiatives - conducted engineer interviews, leveraged LLM analysis to prioritize improvements, co-authored company-wide best practices, and championed modern tooling adoption (JUnit, AssertJ, GitHub Copilot)
- Mentored interns and frontend engineers transitioning to backend, supported quarterly OKR planning, and recognized with MVP award and Top Interviewer distinction
Yelp, Software Engineer at Ads Platform
01/2020 – 08/2021
- One of the developers/maintainers for the Yelp Campaign Management APIs.
- Developed the customization features (e.g. Location targeting, Keywords targeting) for campaigns with AWS SQS, Kafka, StreamSQL, Redshift
- Migrated daily ad inventory ETL from MapReduce to Spark and reduced the 75% runtime and cost.
- Led the project to integrate our experimentation platform into Ads team, cooperated with stakeholders across teams, and advocate new tool in Ads team (~50 engineers).
- Release engineer for deploying code across multiple teams
- Mentored new hires and helped them onboard smoothly and quickly.
- Joined on-call rotation to debug production issues across Ad system.
- Became the on-point who answered any question related to our system in team slack channel.
- One of the instructors of Ads academy and teached ~ 20 new hires each cohort.
Yelp, Software Engineering Intern
05/2019 – 08/2019
- Designed the schema of new Cassandra table to support more complex and flexible query.
- Modified a MapReduce batch and persisted data into AWS S3, Cassandra and Redshift
- Created a RESTful API using Pyramid and manipulated MySQL tables with SQLALchemy.
- Built a Python batch for comparing or backfilling Cassandra tables in the past two years(140GB) and solved the performance problems of querying without partition key.