Zhao Dong
About Zhao Dong
Zhao Dong is a Software Engineer at Arista Networks, with a background in Information Security and Telecommunications Engineering.
Current Position
Zhao Dong is currently a Software Engineer at Arista Networks, a position he has held since 2020. Based in the San Francisco Bay Area, Zhao contributes to the development of network infrastructure software. His responsibilities include maintaining and enhancing software modules focused on monitoring switch, port, and link states, as well as topology discovery and host tracking. Additionally, he leads the refactor of the dynamic routing stack to support BGP and OSPF routing protocols using Arista EOS Docker containers.
Previous Experience at Big Switch Networks
Before joining Arista Networks, Zhao Dong worked at Big Switch Networks. His tenure at Big Switch Networks includes a full-time role as a Software Engineer from 2019 to 2020, where he contributed for 7 months in Santa Clara, CA. Zhao's experience at the company also includes an internship as a Software Engineer Intern in 2018 for 3 months in the San Francisco Bay Area. During his time at Big Switch Networks, Zhao honed his skills in network management and software engineering.
Educational Background
Zhao Dong completed his Master's degree in Information Security from Carnegie Mellon University, where he studied from 2017 to 2019. Prior to that, he earned a Bachelor's degree in Telecommunications Engineering from Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, having studied there from 2012 to 2016. His educational background provided a strong foundation in network security and telecommunications, which he applies in his professional roles.
Early Career and Internships
Zhao Dong's early career includes several pivotal internships. He served as a Research Assistant at Tsinghua University in 2017 for 3 months in Beijing City, China. Additionally, Zhao held internships at Cisco from 2015 to 2016 for 7 months and at H3C Technologies Co., Ltd in 2015 for 4 months, both located in Beijing City, China. These roles allowed him to gain valuable experience in software engineering and network technology, laying the groundwork for his future career.
Key Technical Contributions
Throughout his career, Zhao Dong has made notable technical contributions. At Arista Networks, he implemented gRPC and REST communication between the controller and EOS to enhance network management. He also developed support for high availability failover and upgrades with BGP/OSPF Graceful Restart in the Converged Cloud Fabric product. Additionally, Zhao integrated Analytic Nodes for fabric one-shot analysis, pushing fabric information to the Analytics Node Redis database to enable multi-pod monitoring. These contributions have been crucial in advancing the capabilities of network infrastructure software.