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, delivered a 10x performance improvement on its core classification function, and previously led a 14-person team on Amazon Alexa's cloud platform. Selectively open to Staff, Principal, or Architect-level roles in data governance, AI governance, privacy, or security.
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.
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 production improvements, p50/p90 compression, architecture-level optimization
- Platform & API engineering — Tier-1 services at 100k+ TPS, developer platform ownership, API design at scale
Experience
Snowflake Sep 2022 – present
Data Governance & Privacy Engineer
- Built the data classification platform that automatically discovers and tags sensitive data across Snowflake's cloud
- 10x performance improvement on core classification function — reduced p90 latency from 80s → 10s, compressed p50/p90 delta ratio from 1x to 0.4x
- 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
- Led 14-person engineering team decoupling THE Alexa cloud service into three fundamental platform services, impacting 10,000+ internal developers
- Built A2GS (backend for Amazon Astro robot) from scratch; operated Tier-1 service at 100k+ TPS with millisecond latency
- Led universal application contract design reviewed and signed off by L10 Principal engineer
- Subject matter expert in Alexa Skills Kit security and event flow architecture
HSBC 2012 – 2016
Senior Software Engineer — Global Markets Technology
- Founded MESA environment management platform; reduced env 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 2011 – 2012
Release Engineer
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
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 one year as a release 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 delivered a 10x performance improvement on the core classification function (p90 latency from 80s to 10s) by innovating on Snowflake's UDTF parallel scan architecture.
- What is Chao Tan's most relevant leadership accomplishment?
- At Amazon Alexa, he led a 14-person engineering team that decoupled THE Alexa cloud service into three fundamental platform services, impacting 10,000+ internal developers. He also built A2GS, the backend for Amazon's Astro robot, from scratch — a Tier-1 service running at 100k+ TPS at millisecond latency.
- Where is Chao Tan based?
- Bellevue, Washington, USA. See the Contact section for outreach.
Contact
All opinions here are my own and do not represent my employer.