Ian Gu

Ian Gu

Software Development Engineer at AWS

I work on Aurora PostgreSQL Limitless Database at AWS in Toronto, across PostgreSQL internals and the distributed systems that coordinate a cluster. Before that I studied computer science at the University of Toronto and interned at Meta.

Work

  1. Amazon Web Services

    — Present

    Software Development Engineer · Toronto, ON

    • Lead development on core components of Aurora PostgreSQL Limitless Database, which gives Aurora automated horizontal scaling.
    • Work across PostgreSQL internals and the distributed C++ components that coordinate a cluster.
    • Own major and patch releases end to end.

  2. Meta

    —

    Software Engineer, Intern · Menlo Park, CA

    • Built and shipped a voice clip recorder for Instagram Web in React and ReScript, integrating new components with the existing direct message infrastructure.
    • Prepared every direct thread entrypoint for the user cutover from open threads to encrypted threads.

  3. Amazon Web Services

    —

    Software Development Engineer, Intern · Toronto, ON

    • Built C diagnostic tools for Aurora PostgreSQL that detect clock drift and orphaned prepared transactions, speeding up root cause analysis for on-call engineers.
Earlier roles

  1. LoyaltyOne

    —

    Software Developer, Intern · Toronto, ON

    • Built an internal asset manager for Adobe Experience Manager that cut deployment time by up to 45 minutes.

  2. PickEasy

    —

    Software Developer, Intern · Toronto, ON

    • Cut home-page load time by over 50% by rewriting the underlying SQL queries.
    • Shipped features in Flask and React Native for a restaurant service that grew organic restaurant sign-ups 8×.
    • Built and released a gratitude journaling app end to end.

  3. Shipenvoy

    —

    Software Engineer, Contract · Toronto, ON

    • Built a full-stack logistics platform from scratch in two months with React and Parse.
    • Added package tracking, warehouse admin tooling (batch operations, CSV import/export, CRUD), and user support.
    • Automated deploys with GitHub Actions CI/CD.

  4. University of Toronto, I&ITS

    —

    Software Developer, Intern · Toronto, ON

    • Coordinated migrating a legacy student service system from PHP to Java Spring Boot.
    • Authored MySQL migration scripts to resolve inconsistencies between the database and application code.
    • Escalated and helped remediate security issues around storing sensitive data.

Education

University of Toronto

2018 — 2023

Honours BSc, Computer Science · Software Engineering specialist

Projects