Systems Software Engineer · CMU MS · 2027 New Grad

Hi, I'm Yuchen Zhou (Erwin).

Backend Architect - System Design, Database Internals, AI/Agents Infra

About

I'm a software engineer and a Master's student in Information Networking at Carnegie Mellon University, focused on distributed systems, database internals, and cloud infrastructure. Before CMU I earned a B.E. in Information Security from Nankai University.

I like systems! They are cool because they tell you everything beyond just the surface. I build systems, too — across internships and personal projects I have built scalable, reliable, and efficient backend and infrastructure. Most recently I applied that systems background to AI agent infrastructure, contributing to the core of ENFOS's first agentic platform, Atlas AI. I implemented its ReAct-based multi-agent architecture, with hybrid-retrieval context engineering, agentic memory, and fully provisioned AWS pipelines (EventBridge, SQS, Lambda, DynamoDB, Bedrock) behind it.

Outside of the terminal, I am a huge FC Barcelona fan, and a big nerd for anime, TV, and movies. I'm currently actively seeking 2027 New Grad SDE roles in the US. Feel free to reach out to me!

Skills

Programming Languages

Cloud

Tools

Selected projects

All projects →

BusTub — Relational Database Internals

Built core internals of a disk-oriented relational DBMS in C++ — buffer pool, B+ tree indexing, a query execution engine, and optimizer rewrite rules. Top 5% on the performance leaderboard.

C++ Database Internals Concurrency Query Optimization
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Suffix Speculative Decoding for LLM Serving

Integrated suffix-based speculative decoding into the Hugging Face generation stack — a draft-model-free proposer reusing repeated context patterns for 1.74x faster decoding — plus a unified verification interface for suffix and tree-based speculation, achieving 1.30x speedup on tree-spec workloads.

PyTorch LLM Inference Hugging Face Transformers
Read more → GitHub

Distributed Scholarly Search Engine

A microservices search engine on a 3-node GCP cluster (Docker, Kafka, MapReduce, Terraform) indexing 10K+ IEEE abstracts, with 37% faster queries by conditionally skipping MapReduce jobs.

Docker Kafka MapReduce Terraform GCP
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Latest writing

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A short note on what this space is for — engineering notes, things I am learning, and the occasional detour.

#meta#writing

Life

A little beyond the terminal — soccer, films, travel, and the people along the way.