Yuan Tang

Work Experience

Senior Principal Software Engineer April 2025 - current

Principal Software Engineer Dec 2023 - March 2025

Red Hat

- Serving in the technical leadership team, responsible for technical decision making and product alignment across the AI Engineering organization of 300+ engineers;

- Representing Red Hat as a member of Kubeflow Steering Committee, co-chair of Kubernetes WG Serving, and the primary technical contact of LF AI & Data Foundation;

- Building scalable model serving platform on Kubernetes for OpenShift AI and serving as a Technical Steering Committee member of KServe;

- Working with product managers, engineers, and stakeholders to evaluate and prioritize product enhancement requests regularly as a member of the technical advisory group;

- Serving as the co-chair of AI Engineering SIG Serving to lead internal cross-team discussions and alignment on technical strategy for our AI products;

- Mentoring team members at various levels and establishing partnerships and collaborations with external organizations and communities;

- Led successful adoption of Llama Stack as the Red Hat AI GenAI API standard and became the first non-Meta project maintainer;

- Received company-wide awards such as IBM Technical Leadership Award and OpenShift AI Jedi Peer Recognition Award, as well as numerous awards and internal recognitions from colleagues.

Founding Engineer Sep 2021 - Nov 2023

Akuity

- First founding engineer in the company: bootstrapped engineering infrastructure; involved in early sales/marketing initiatives; interviewed and recruited most of our engineers;

- Led the development of Argo Workflows, maintained Argo CD, and provided enterprise support and architectural reviews for our customers;

- Led our AI Assistant Extension to help developers quickly analyze any issues with the managed Kubernetes resources and applications;

- Designed and implemented major components of the Akuity Platform, an enterprise-ready and fully-managed DevOps platform that is scalable, reliable, and secure;

- Led the efforts to successful compliance certification and hardened our engineering operation and security best practices;

- Co-authored CNCF Certified Argo Project Associate exam.

Senior Software Engineer / Tech Lead June 2018 - Aug 2021

Alibaba Group

- Built AI infrastructure and AutoML platform on Kubernetes; served as the co-chair of Kubeflow and led the development of various distributed training operators;

- Designed and implemented major components of ElasticDL to support fault-tolerance and elastic scheduling for deep learning workloads; co-inventor of the patent for the underlying system and method for distributed task execution; integrated with SQLFlow to enable machine learning with extended SQL dialect;

- Led the design and development of Couler and Argo Workflows to provide scalable cloud-native workflow orchestration for data science teams.

Senior AI Platform Engineer Dec 2017 - May 2018

H2O.ai

- Contributed to the open source machine learning platform H2O;

- Built the model management component of Driverless AI that automates the end-to-end data science workflows.

Data Science Lead Sep 2015 - Nov 2017

Uptake

- Led a team that built our scalable data science platform to monitor the condition of industry assets such as trains, airplanes, and wind turbines to avoid machine failures and reduce downtime;

- Built intelligent monitoring platform from the ground up to automatically monitor internal microservices in real-time at scale and was the lead inventor of the patent for the underlying anomaly detection algorithm;

- Led all the open source initiatives within data science team.

Selected Services

Open Source Community Leadership 2019 - current

- Co-Chair and Founding Member, Kubernetes WG Serving, 2024 - current

- Project Lead and Technical Steering Committee Member, KServe, 2024 - current

- Project Lead, Argo, 2021 - current

- Project Lead, Co-Chair, and Steering Committee Member, Kubeflow, 2020 - current

- PMC and Committer, XGBoost, 2020 - current

- PMC and Committer, Apache MXNet, 2017 - 2023

Conferences and Journals 2018 - current

- Program Chair of Cloud Native + Kubernetes AI Day (Europe, North America, China), 2024 - 2025

- Program Committee Member of KubeCon AI/ML Track (Europe, North America, China, Japan, India), 2024 - 2025

- Program Chair of Data on Kubernetes Day at KubeCon North America, 2023

- Editor of Journal of Open Source Software, 2018 - 2022

- Reviewer of Journal of Machine Learning Research, 2021

- Insight Partner on AI Technology of Synced Review, 2019

Technical Advisor 2019 - current

- Metabit Trading, cloud-native infrastructure for quantitative trading

- NascentCore, high-performance large model training infrastructure

- Chaintool (now part of Codatta), distributed graph database system for risk management on Web3 [project]

- TensorChord, container-based reproducible development environment for AI/ML [project]

- Moises (now part of Music.AI), AI-powered music and audio platform

- Maven Wave (now Eviden, part of Atos), machine learning, data visualization, and open source strategy [project]

- CSPA (acquired by AngelList), technical steering and open source strategy

Mentor at Google Summer of Code 2016 - 2024

- Kubeflow, 2024 [project] [certificate]

- Argo, 2022 [project]

- Kubeflow, 2020 [project] [certificate]

- TensorFlow, 2019 [project] [certificate]

- R Project for Statistical Computing, 2016 [project] [certificate]

Investor 2024 - current

- Figure AI (Series C)

- Blok (Pre-seed)

- Probabl (Seed)

Education

Georgia Institute of Technology Aug 2019 - Aug 2025

Master of Science in Computer Science (unfinished)

Finished classes: Software Development Process, Databases, Computer Networks, Software Architecture and Design, Artificial Intelligence for Robotics, Data & Visual Analytics, Entrepreneurship, and Computer Law.

Schreyer Honors College at Pennsylvania State University Aug 2012 - May 2015

Bachelor of Science in Mathematics with Honors [thesis]

Participated groups: Society of Distinguished Alumni, PNC Leadership Assessment Center, Distinguished Honors Faculty Program, Innoblue Accelerator, Innoblue accelerator, and New leaf Initiative.

Selected Projects [full list]

Kubeflow [link] Project Lead & Steering Committee Member

Machine learning toolkits on Kubernetes

Argo [link] Project Lead

- Project lead of Argo Workflows, the container-native workflow engine

- Maintainer of Argo CD, and declarative continuous delivery tools for Kubernetes

KServe [link] Project Lead & Technical Steering Committee Member

Standardized serverless ML inference platform on Kubernetes

TensorFlow [link] Co-author & Maintainer

- End-to-end open source platform for machine learning. Co-author of TensorFlow Estimators and maintainer of TensorFlow I/O

- Co-author of TensorFlow in R

XGBoost [link] Maintainer & PMC

General-purpose gradient boosting library

Llama Stack [link] Maintainer

Standardized and composable building blocks for AI applications

ElasticDL [link] Maintainer

Kubernetes-native deep learning framework with fault-tolerance and elastic scheduling

reticulate [link] Co-author

R interface to Python - comprehensive set of tools for interoperability between Python and R

metric-learn [link] Co-author

Python package for state-of-art metric learning algorithms

Selected Talks [full list]

[Keynote] Advancing Cloud Native AI Innovation Through Open Collaboration

Keynote Speaker, Cloud Native & Kubernetes AI Day North America 2024 [link]

Production-Ready AI Platform on Kubernetes

Speaker, KubeCon Europe 2024 [link]

[Keynote] Building for the Road Ahead: An Ode to Maintainers, the Life Blood of Our Ecosystem

Invited Keynote Speaker, KubeCon North America 2022 [link]

Data Science in the Cloud-Native Era

Invited Speaker, Open Data Science Conference 2022 [link]

[Keynote] When Machine Learning Toolkit for Kubernetes Meets PaddlePaddle

Invited Keynote Speaker, Wave Summit [link]

Unveil The Secret Ingredients for Argo CD at Enterprise Scale

Invited Speaker, KubeCon China 2021 [link]

Bridging into Python Ecosystem with Cloud-Native Distributed Machine Learning Pipelines

Speaker, ArgoCon 2021 [link]

Towards Cloud-Native Distributed Machine Learning Pipelines at Scale

Speaker, PyData Global 2021 [link]

Large Scale Distributed Deep Learning with Kubernetes Operators

Invited Speaker, KubeCon Europe 2019 [link]

Publications [Google Scholar]

[Conference] Couler: Unified Machine Learning Workflow Optimization in Cloud 2024

Xiaoda Wang,

Yuan Tang,

Tengda Guo,

Bo Sang,

Jingji Wu,

Jian Sha,

Ke Zhang,

Jiang Qian,

Mingjie Tang

40th IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE)

[PDF] [GitHub]

[Book] Distributed Machine Learning Patterns 2023

Yuan Tang

Manning Publications, ISBN 9781617299025

[Link] [GitHub]

[Patent] System and Method for Distributed Task Execution 2023

Yi Wang,

Wei Yan,

Yuan Tang,

Haitao Zhang,

Chunyang Wen,

Minghao Li,

Jun Qi,

Yongfeng Liu

China Patent CN110609749B

[PDF]

[Book] Dive into Deep Learning (with TensorFlow)《动手学深度学习》 2020

Aston Zhang,

Zachary C. Lipton,

Mu Li,

Alexander J. Smola,

Anirudh Dagar,

Yuan Tang

[Link] [GitHub]

[Journal] metric-learn: Metric Learning Algorithms in Python 2020

William de Vazelhes,

CJ Carey,

Yuan Tang,

Nathalie Vauquier,

Aurélien Bellet

Journal of Machine Learning Research (JMLR)

[PDF] [GitHub]

[Preprint] A Scalable and Cloud-Native Hyperparameter Tuning System 2020

Johnu George,

Ce Gao,

Richard Liu,

Hou Gang Liu,

Yuan Tang,

Ramdoot Pydipaty,

Amit Kumar Saha

arXiv preprint arXiv:2006.02085

[PDF] [GitHub]

[Patent] Systems and Methods for Detecting and Remedying Software Anomalies 2020

Yuan Tang,

Tuo Li,

James Herzog

United States Patent US10635519B1

[PDF]

[Preprint] SQLFlow: A Bridge between SQL and Machine Learning 2020

Yi Wang,

Yang Yang,

Weiguo Zhu,

Yi Wu,

Xu Yan,

Yongfeng Liu,

Yu Wang,

Liang Xie,

Ziyao Gao,

Wenjing Zhu,

Xiang Chen,

Wei Yan,

Mingjie Tang,

Yuan Tang

arXiv preprint arXiv:2001.06846

[PDF] [GitHub]

[Journal] lfda: Local Fisher Discriminant Analysis in R 2019

Yuan Tang,

Wenxuan Li

Journal of Open Source Software (JOSS)

[PDF] [GitHub]

[Journal] dml: Distance Metric Learning in R 2018

Yuan Tang,

Tao Gao,

Nan Xiao

Journal of Open Source Software (JOSS)

[PDF] [GitHub]

[Journal] autoplotly: An R Package for Automatic Generation of Interactive Visualizations for Statistical Results 2018

Yuan Tang

Journal of Open Source Software (JOSS)

[PDF] [GitHub]

[Conference] TensorFlow Estimators: Managing Simplicity vs. Flexibility in High-Level Machine Learning Frameworks 2017

Heng-Tze Cheng,

Lichan Hong,

Mustafa Ispir,

Clemens Mewald,

Zakaria Haque,

Illia Polosukhin,

Georgios Roumpos,

D Sculley,

Jamie Smith,

David Soergel,

Yuan Tang,

Philipp Tucker,

Martin Wicke,

Cassandra Xia,

Jianwei Xie

Proceedings of the 23rd ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD)

[PDF] [GitHub]

[Book] TensorFlow in Practice《TensorFlow实战》 2017

Wenjian Huang,

Yuan Tang

Beijing Publishing House of Electronics Industry

[Link] [GitHub]

[Journal] ggfortify: Unified Interface to Visualize Statistical Result of Popular R Packages 2016

Yuan Tang,

Masaaki Horikoshi,

Wenxuan Li

The R Journal

[PDF] [GitHub]

[Preprint] Incorporating Hierarchical Structure into Dynamic Systems: An Application of Estimating HIV Epidemics at Sub-National and Sub-Population Level 2016

Le Bao,

Ben Sheng,

Xiaoyue Niu,

Yuan Tang,

Tim Brown,

Peter D. Ghys,

Jeff W. Eaton

arXiv preprint arXiv:1602.05665

[PDF]

Awards

Awards by Teams at Red Hat and IBM 2023 - current

- IBM Technical Leadership Award, Dec 10th, 2024

- OpenShift AI Jedi Peer Recognition Award, Red Hat Multiplier and Influence, Oct 18th, 2024

- Numerous internal awards and recognitions from Red Hat colleagues

[details]

Multiple Awards by Teams at Alibaba Group 2020 - 2021

- Inner Source Pioneer, April 17th, 2021 [certificate]

- Top Open Source Contributor of the Year, Jan 20th, 2020

- Best Pull Request of the Week, May 3rd, 2020

The Publishers Association of China

Outstanding Author 2017

Beijing Publishing House of Electronics Industry

[certificate]

Open Source Peer Bonus Award 2016

Google Inc.

[announcement] [letter]

Multiple Awards to DataNovo Startup Team 2015 - 2016

- Top 3 Finalist by SXSW Interactive, 2016

- Top Startup Winner by TiE50, 2016

- Trial Support Software Innovation Award by Legaltech News, The Recorder, 2016

- B2B Finalist by Launch Festival, 2015

Best Virtual Reality Hack at HackRPI 2014

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

[announcement] [project]

Multiple Awards by Schreyer Honors College at Penn State 2014

- Pre-Eminence in Honors Education Fund ($5,000)

- Summer Research Grants ($1,200)

- NSF MCTP Grant and PMASS Fellowship ($12,800)

- John K. Tsui Honors Scholarship ($5,300)