David Zhan
About
I’m a CS student @ Penn focused on building reliable, high-performance systems. My work spans distributed storage, operating systems, and machine learning infrastructure.
Recently, I’ve become more interested in low-level systems programming and AI interpretability research. Feel free to check out some of my projects.
Experience
Designed and built the gcloud CLI surface for Omnichannel Gateway, taking it from design doc through implementation and review so Cloud customers can manage endpoint configs, routes, and token brokers from the command line. Defined the command hierarchy and argument schema against the gcloud style guidelines, implemented the commands on the Calliope framework with support for long-running operations, and covered them with declarative scenario tests.
Improved performance of Amazon Nova base models through pretraining data enhancement techniques including distillation, augmentation, and chain-of-thought prompting. Designed and deployed an end-to-end data augmentation pipeline for unlabeled text data that reduced average inference time by 30×.
Supported students in technical coursework through tutoring, office hours, and conceptual explanations.