Illustrated portrait of Seed Zeng

Seed Zeng

AI Infra | Engineering Leader | Angel Investor

Building Critical Systems, Growing Exceptional Teams

As a Senior Staff Engineer at DoorDash, I lead the architecture and evolution of the company's core storage platforms. From distributed databases to large-scale data infrastructure, my work powers the systems millions of customers rely on every day. Beyond technology, I focus on growing engineers and building high-performing teams.

Experience

or click a row to expand
Senior Staff Software Engineer · DoorDash 2026.1 — present

I lead the team and own the technical direction for DoorDash's Storage org — the data infrastructure the whole company runs on.
  • Lead and grow a 40-engineer organization — mentoring and developing staff and senior engineers into the next layer of technical leaders.
  • Set vision and roadmap for DoorDash’s next-generation storage platform, including Event Bus, Chronos, and self-serve datastore automation.
  • Own the online datastore platform every product team builds on — accountable for reliability, performance, and long-term architecture behind millions of orders a day.
Staff Software Engineer · DoorDash 2022.7 — 2025.12

Made DoorDash's core storage faster and cheaper as the business scaled globally.
  • Built and scaled Event Bus, a platform abstraction over Kafka that enables product teams to publish and consume events without operating Kafka directly.
  • Built Chronos, a storage orchestration platform for running safe, auditable, self-serve operations across Cassandra, Kafka, CockroachDB, Redis, and Postgres.
  • Drove fleet-wide efficiency and performance gains across the Cassandra deployment (“Cassandra Unleashed”), reducing cost while improving reliability.
Lead Software Engineer · Meta 2020.8 — 2022.10

Tech-led data-integrity systems for Meta's distributed infrastructure.
  • Built inconsistency-detection services for large distributed systems using novel techniques.
  • Scaled complex backend services to absorb major traffic spikes.
  • Mentored engineers and helped them grow.
Senior Software Engineer · Klaviyo 2019.5 — 2020.8

Re-architected Klaviyo's data ingestion and scaled it ~300×.
  • Built Abacus 2.0 — a full overhaul of the ingestion model, read API, and schema — ~10× faster than its predecessor.
  • Scaled the pipeline from 500 to 150,000 events/sec (3M DB writes/sec), built to scale horizontally.
  • Wrote the migration service that moved production data onto the new schema.
Founding Engineer · Klaviyo 2017.4 — 2019.7

Built the streaming foundations Klaviyo's data platform still runs on.
  • Built Abacus 1.0 on Apache Flink, replacing the legacy ingestion pipeline — 1.5B events on Cyber Monday alone.
  • Built Klaviyo’s first Kafka microservice, now handling billions of events a day.
  • Maintained core data stores (MySQL, Cassandra, Redis, Memcache) and refactored the legacy pipeline to clean OOP.
Backend Software Engineer · SurveyMini (acq. by SMG) 2016.7 — 2017.3

Backend engineer on survey infrastructure and AWS data systems; I moved on following SurveyMini’s acquisition by SMG.
  • Built survey-branching logic that adapts each next question to user input.
  • Improved AWS scalability and led a migration from Postgres to DynamoDB.

Education

or click a row to expand
Washington University in St. Louis 2014 — 2016

B.S. Computer Science · GPA 3.97 · Summa Cum Laude · Full scholarship

Computer science with a focus on algorithms and systems — the groundwork for a career in infrastructure.
  • Ranked 9 / 500
  • Brown Fellowship recipient
  • Teaching assistant — Advanced Algorithms, Web Development, iOS Development
Denison University 2011 — 2014

B.A. Physics · Major GPA 3.97 · Summa Cum Laude

A physics foundation that still shapes how I reason about hard problems — rigor, measurement, first principles.
  • Recognized for outstanding contribution to the Physics Department
  • Co-authored a paper in Physical Review A; researched laser cooling of negative ions at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab

Writing

Podcast

Venture Vibes

on a break

Conversations with founders on the craft and chaos of building startups. New episodes are paused for now while I'm on a break.

Get in touch

Like what you see here? Drop me a line — I'm more awesome in person.

or email me directly: seedzpy@gmail.com