About Me
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 owned APIs serving hundreds of millions of requests, led a 14-person engineering team through a major infrastructure decoupling that impacted 10,000+ internal developers, and built the backend for Amazon's consumer robot (Astro) from scratch.
I've been building software since 2004, 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 improvements, p50/p90 compression, architecture-level optimization (O(N) to O(log N))
- API design and distributed systems — Tier-1 services at 100k+ TPS, microservices architecture, platform APIs
- Technical leadership — led teams of 14+ engineers, 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
Outside work
Art, food, basketball, swimming, and skiing. Father of two.