Sunghwan Yoo

Sunghwan Yoo

Staff Software Engineer at Google · Sunnyvale, California

Software-defined networking for Google’s data centers.

About

I am a staff software engineer at Google Cloud on the Network Infrastructure team, where I am tech lead for the Orion Routing Engine — Google’s software-defined network controller that computes data-center routing in the abstract and programs the switches accordingly. For most of my career I have designed, built and operated SDN control software at that scale.

My technical interests are networking, routing, distributed systems and cloud infrastructure, alongside the craft of software engineering itself. I also care about building and leading good teams, and I enjoy strategically complex problems whether they are technical or organizational.

My Ph.D. work at Purdue was on networking, distributed systems, parallel computing and fault tolerance. Outside work I read a great deal — around 170 books a year — play unhurried games (RPGs, SRPGs, puzzles), and keep a few hobby projects going.

Experience

Google

May 2024 – Present
Staff Software Engineer · Sunnyvale, CA
  • Tech lead for the Orion Routing Engine, Google’s software-defined network controller that computes data-center routing in the abstract and programs the fleet of network switches.
Oct 2018 – Apr 2024
Senior Software Engineer · Sunnyvale, CA
  • SDN controller software running in Google data centers: design, implementation and test.
  • Aquila: a unified, low-latency fabric for datacenter networks (NSDI ’22).
Aug 2014 – Oct 2018
Software Engineer · Sunnyvale, CA
  • SDN controller software running in Google data centers: design, implementation and test.
May 2013 – Aug 2013
Software Engineering Intern · Mountain View, CA
  • Mesa, the large-scale distributed database behind Google’s Ads infrastructure.

Purdue University

Aug 2013 – May 2014
Graduate Teaching Assistant, Computer Science
  • Problem Solving & Object-Oriented Programming (CS 180); Computer Networks (CS 422).
Sep 2008 – Aug 2013
Research Assistant, Computer Science
  • EventWave — a scalable, elastic distributed event-driven framework (SoCC ’13).
  • MaceKen — a fault-tolerant distributed systems framework (USENIX ATC ’12).
  • InContext — annotation-based multi-threading for event-driven systems (HPDC ’11).
  • MapReduce in Mace — a high-performance distributed computing application (HPDC ’11).
Jan 2010 – May 2011
Research Assistant, Rosen Center for Advanced Computing
  • GridSphere-based web service serving LARS, GOES, NEXRAD and climate radar data, backed by SRB/iRODS data management.
Sep 2008 – Jan 2010
Research Assistant, Biological Sciences
  • Extreme Collaboration: a highly available distributed computation model for biological problems.
  • Finding correlated evolution patterns in DNA and protein sequences.

Hewlett-Packard Laboratories

May 2011 – Oct 2011
Research Intern · Palo Alto, CA
  • Early version of MaceKen, a fault-tolerant distributed systems framework.

Yonsei University

Jan 2006 – May 2008
Part-time Developer, Database Laboratory
  • Web-based OLAP application in PHP, Java and MySQL.
  • Java user interface for a statistical intrusion-prevention system.
  • Administration of the lab’s machines.
Mar 2006 – May 2006
Undergraduate Teaching Assistant
  • Automata and Formal Languages.

Education

2008 – 2014
Ph.D., Computer Science
Purdue University

Dissertation: a unified model for building multi-threaded, fault-tolerant distributed systems frameworks.

2008 – 2010
M.S., Computer Science
Purdue University
2001 – 2008
B.S., Computer Science and Business Administration (double major)
Yonsei University