About Me
Chao Tan is a data governance and privacy engineer at Snowflake. He built Snowflake's data classification platform — the system that automatically discovers and tags sensitive data across customer accounts. Before Snowflake, he was a tech lead on Amazon Alexa's cloud platform, owning APIs at hundreds of millions of requests per day and serving as tech lead for a 50+ engineer organization. He writes about data protection, AI system security, and performance engineering.
My name is Chao Tan (谭超). Call me Chao or tc.
I'm a data governance and privacy engineer at Snowflake in Bellevue, Washington. I built the data classification platform that automatically discovers and tags sensitive data across Snowflake's cloud — the system that helps organizations understand what data they have, where it is, and how it should be protected.
Before Snowflake, I spent six years at Amazon as a tech lead on Alexa's cloud platform services. I built and owned the Alexa Application Gateway Service (A2GS) from scratch, which also became the backend for Amazon's consumer robot (Astro) — a Tier-0 service running 100K average and 180K peak TPS under a 50ms p90 budget, at 99.9975% availability for two years. I was tech lead for a 50+ engineer organization, and led the 14-person project team that split THE Alexa monolith into three platform services, unblocking ~5,000 internal developers.
I've been building software since 2007, across four companies and three countries. Automation methodology at eBay, global distributed systems at HSBC, ownership culture at Amazon, and now data governance at Snowflake. Each place taught me something the previous one couldn't.
Domain expertise
- Data governance and privacy — classification, tagging, sensitive data discovery, compliance automation
- AI system governance — securing and governing data pipelines that feed AI/ML workloads
- Performance engineering — 10x latency and 1000x throughput improvements in production, p50/p90 compression, architecture-level optimization (O(N) to O(log N))
- API design and distributed systems — Tier-0 services at 180K peak TPS, microservices architecture, platform APIs
- Technical leadership — tech lead for a 50+ engineer organization, led a 14-person project team, coached sister teams, operated through ambiguity
What I believe in
- Long-term engineering value over short-term velocity
- Automation over process — if it can be automated, it should be
SDE = Somebody Do Everything— not just code, but the full outcome- First principles thinking before reaching for tools
- Stay foolish, stay hungry
Patent applications
- Efficient Computation over a Wide Table — US20260003847A1 · Snowflake Inc. · Filed Jun 2024
- Automatic Tag Propagation — US20250371036A1 · Snowflake Inc. · Filed Aug 2024
- Column Classification Model — US20240330412A1 · Snowflake Inc. · Filed Mar 2023
Outside work
Art, food, basketball, swimming, and skiing. Father of two.
Contact
[email protected] · GitHub · Twitter @chaostan
Elsewhere
FAQ
- Who is Chao Tan?
- Chao Tan is a data governance and privacy engineer at Snowflake. He built Snowflake's data classification platform, which automatically discovers and tags sensitive data across customer accounts. Before Snowflake, he was a tech lead on Amazon Alexa's cloud platform services.
- Where does Chao Tan work?
- Snowflake, based in Bellevue, Washington. He builds the data classification platform that underlies sensitive-data discovery and tag-driven access policies across Snowflake's cloud.
- What did Chao Tan do at Amazon?
- Six years at Amazon, primarily as a tech lead on Alexa's cloud platform services. He built and owned the Alexa Application Gateway Service (A2GS), which also became the backend for Amazon's consumer robot (Astro) — a Tier-0 service at 100K average and 180K peak TPS under a 50ms p90 budget, with 99.9975% availability over two years. He was tech lead for a 50+ engineer organization and led the 14-person project team that split THE Alexa monolith into three platform services, unblocking ~5,000 internal developers.
- What patents has Chao Tan filed?
- Three pending patent applications at Snowflake: Efficient Computation over a Wide Table (US20260003847A1, filed June 2024), Automatic Tag Propagation (US20250371036A1, filed August 2024), and Column Classification Model (US20240330412A1, filed March 2023).
- What does Chao Tan write about?
- Data governance, data privacy, AI system security, performance engineering, API design, and engineering career — primarily from the perspective of an engineer who has owned production systems at scale.
- How can I contact Chao Tan?
- Email [email protected], GitHub @tanchao, or Twitter/X @chaostan. For consulting or advisory engagements, see the Work page at tanchao.xyz/hire-me/.