Work

Chao Tan is a data governance and privacy engineer at Snowflake with 18 years of production engineering experience. He built Snowflake's data classification platform, authored the Cortex Code data governance skill that shipped to GA as one of the platform's three most-used skills, and previously was tech lead for a 50+ engineer organization on Amazon Alexa's cloud platform. Selectively open to Staff, Principal, or Architect-level roles in data governance, AI governance, privacy, or security.

My name is Chao Tan (谭超). Call me Chao or tc.

I'm a data governance and privacy engineer with 18 years of experience building and securing large-scale systems. I'm selectively open to conversations about roles where I can shape how organizations govern, protect, and classify data — particularly as AI systems make this exponentially harder and more important.

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 & privacy — classification, tagging, sensitive data discovery, compliance automation at cloud scale
• AI system governance — securing and governing data pipelines, model training data provenance, access control for AI workloads
• Performance engineering — 10x latency and 1000x throughput improvements in production, p50/p90 compression, architecture-level optimization
• Platform & API engineering — Tier-0 services at 180K peak TPS, developer platform ownership, API design at scale
• 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

Experience

Snowflake Aug 2022 – present

Staff Engineer — Data Governance & Privacy

• Authored the Cortex Code data governance skill — shipped to GA as one of the platform's three most-used skills; translates plain English into row-access and masking policy, constrained by the caller's existing Horizon Catalog grants
• Built Harbor, the evaluation framework that gates every Cortex Code skill release
• Built the data classification platform that automatically discovers and tags sensitive data across Snowflake's cloud
• Rebuilt the core classification engine for 10x lower latency (p90 80s → 10s, p50/p90 delta ratio 1x → 0.4x) and 1000x higher throughput
• Innovated on Snowflake UDTF parallel scan architecture to eliminate per-column linear latency growth
• Designed automatic tag propagation engine with algorithms for performance and eventual consistency

Amazon 2016 – 2022

Senior SDE / Tech Lead — Alexa Cloud Platform Services

• Tech lead for a 50+ engineer organization; led the 14-person project team that split THE Alexa monolith into three platform services, unblocking ~5,000 internal developers
• Built the Alexa Application Gateway Service (A2GS) from scratch — also the backend for Amazon's Astro robot; operated it as a Tier-0 service at 100K average and 180K peak TPS under a 50ms p90 budget, at 99.9975% availability for two years
• Led universal application contract design, reviewed and signed off by Alexa's Distinguished Engineer
• Subject matter expert in Alexa Skills Kit security and event flow architecture

HSBC 2012 – 2016

Senior Software Engineer — Global Markets Technology

• Founded the Automated Murex Management Platform (MESA); reduced environment initialization from 2 days → 2 hours
• Automated full regression testing from 2-week human task to daily automated job
• Expanded platform to North America region; reduced middle office support tickets by 80% via self-service tooling

eBay 2007 – 2012

Software Engineer

Patents

• Efficient Computation over a Wide Table — US12619593B2 · Snowflake Inc. · Granted May 2026
• Automatic Tag Propagation — US20250371036A1 · Snowflake Inc. · Filed Aug 2024
• Column Classification Model — US20240330412A1 · Snowflake Inc. · Filed Mar 2023

Education

B.S. Computer Science + Diploma in Finance, East China University of Science and Technology, 2008.

What I'm looking for

• Data governance, AI governance, privacy, or security — roles where I own how data is classified, protected, and governed
• Companies building AI systems that need someone who understands what governance looks like at scale, before regulators force it
• Strong engineering culture with ownership and mechanisms, not just meetings
• Staff / Principal / Architect-level scope

Outside work

Art, food, basketball, swimming, and skiing. Father of two.

FAQ

Is Chao Tan available for hire?

Selectively open to conversations about Staff, Principal, or Architect-level roles in data governance, data privacy, AI governance, or security. He is currently a Data Governance & Privacy Engineer at Snowflake. Contact via [email protected].

What kind of roles is Chao Tan looking for?

Roles where he owns how data is classified, protected, and governed — particularly at companies building AI systems that need governance designed in before regulators force it. Strong preference for engineering cultures that prize ownership and mechanisms over meetings.

What is Chao Tan's experience level?

18 years building and securing large-scale systems across four companies and three countries. Currently at Snowflake (since 2022) after six years as a Senior SDE and Tech Lead on Amazon Alexa's cloud platform, four years on HSBC Global Markets Technology, and four and a half years as a software engineer at eBay.

What is Chao Tan's most relevant accomplishment for a data governance role?

He built Snowflake's data classification platform — the system that automatically discovers and tags sensitive data across Snowflake's cloud — and rebuilt its core classification engine for 10x lower latency (p90 from 80s to 10s) and 1000x higher throughput by innovating on Snowflake's UDTF parallel scan architecture. More recently he authored the Cortex Code data governance skill, which shipped to GA as one of the platform's three most-used skills.

What is Chao Tan's most relevant leadership accomplishment?

At Amazon Alexa, he was tech lead for a 50+ engineer organization and one of roughly 50 Alexa Call Leaders (on-call incident commanders) across a 20,000-engineer org. He led the 14-person project team that split THE Alexa monolith into three platform services, unblocking ~5,000 internal developers, and built the Alexa Application Gateway Service (A2GS) from scratch — a Tier-0 service at 100K average and 180K peak TPS under a 50ms p90 budget, at 99.9975% availability for two years, which also became the backend for Amazon's Astro robot.

Where is Chao Tan based?

Bellevue, Washington, USA. See the Contact section for outreach.

Contact

[email protected] · GitHub · Twitter @chaostan

All opinions here are my own and do not represent my employer.

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