Yancan Mao

Yancan Mao

System Engineer and Researcher at Bytedance Singapore

About me

I am a System Engineer and Researcher at ByteDance Singapore, where I work on advancing AI infrastructure built on Ray to support large-scale distributed machine learning workloads. Previously, I was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the School of Computing, National University of Singapore (NUS), focusing on cloud-native data systems and stream processing infrastructures. I completed my PhD at NUS under the supervision of Dr. Richard T. B. Ma.

I collaborate closely with Dr. Shuhao Zhang on research in high-performance streaming systems and data-intensive computing.

My research interests span heterogeneous ML workload orchestration, distributed stream processing, and automatic configuration optimization. I have participated in the Apache Flink community and contributed to the Ray ecosystem through incremental improvements informed by my research, especially in areas related to large-scale data processing workloads.

Publications

  • Zhaochen She*, Yancan Mao*, and Richard T. B. Ma. “Sluice: End-to-End Latency Guarantee for Long-running Dataflow Systems.” Proceedings of the 2026 IEEE International Conference on Computer Communications (INFOCOM) 2026. [To Appear]

  • Yancan Mao, Shuhao Zhang, and Richard T. B. Ma. “Spacker: Unified State Migration for Distributed Streaming.” IEEE International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS) 2025. [paper][code]

  • Jianjun Zhao*, Yancan Mao*, Shuhao Zhang, Zhonghao Yang, and Haikun Liu. “Scalable Transactional Stream Processing on Multicore Processors.” IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering (TKDE) 2025. [paper][code]

  • Yancan Mao, Ruohang Yin, Liyuan Lei, Peng Ye, Shengfu Zou, Shizheng Tang, Yunzhe Guo, Ye Yuan, Xiaochen Yu, Bo Wan, Changli Gao, Guanghui Zhang, Jian Shen, Rui Shi, and Richard T. B. Ma. “ByteMQ: A Cloud-native Streaming Data Layer in ByteDance.” Proceedings of the ACM Symposium on Cloud Computing (SoCC) 2024. [paper][news]

  • Yancan Mao, Zhanghao Chen, Yifan Zhang, Meng Wang, Yong Fang, Guanghui Zhang, Rui Shi, and Richard T. B. Ma. “StreamOps: Cloud-Native Runtime Management for Streaming Services in ByteDance.” Proceedings of the VLDB (VLDB) Endowment, 2023. [paper][news]

  • Yancan Mao, Jianjun Zhao, Haikun Liu, and Shuhao Zhang, Volker Markl. “MorphStream: Adaptive Scheduling for Scalable Transactional Stream Processing on Multicores.” Proceedings of the 2023 International Conference on Management of Data (SIGMOD) 2023. [paper][code]

  • Zhaochen She, Yancan Mao, Hailin Xiang, Xin Wang, and Richard T. B. Ma. “StreamSwitch: Fulfilling Latency Service-Layer Agreement for Stateful Streaming.” Proceedings of the 2023 IEEE International Conference on Computer Communications (INFOCOM) 2023. [paper][code]

  • Yancan Mao, Yuan Huang, Runxin Tian, Xin Wang, and Richard T. B. Ma. “Trisk: Task-Centric Data Stream Reconfiguration.” Proceedings of the ACM Symposium on Cloud Computing (SoCC) 2021. [paper][code]

  • Shuhao Zhang, Yancan Mao, Jiong He, Philipp M. Grulich, Steffen Zeuch, Bingsheng He, Richard T. B. Ma, and Volker Markl. “Parallelizing Intra-Window Join on Multicores: An Experimental Study.” Proceedings of the 2021 International Conference on Management of Data (SIGMOD) 2021. [paper][code]

Education

  • National University of Singapore (Sep 2019 - Aug 2024)
    • Ph.D. in Computer Science
  • National University of Singapore (Aug 2018 - Sep 2019)
    • Master of Computing
  • University of Electronic Science and Technology of China (Aug 2014 - Jun 2018)
    • Bachelor of Software Engineering

Work Experiences

  • TikTok (Singapore) - System and Research Engineer (Jun 2025 - Now)
    • Improving efficiency, scalability, and observability of hetergeneous and large-scale AI infra.
  • TikTok (Singapore) - Research Intern (Apr 2022 - Mar 2023)
    • Co-designed and co-developed the policy-guided runtime management system StreamOps for cluster-wide streaming services in ByteDance cloud.
  • Baidu (Beijing) - Software Engineer Intern (Dec 2016 - Aug 2017)
    • Full-stack web development for two projects the Baidu Lawyer and the Baidu User Credit Management Platform.

Honors & Awards

  • Research Achievement Award of National University of Singapore (2024)
  • Outstanding Research Projects of the Year in ByteDance Academic Committee (2023)
  • Flink Forward Asia Hackathon 2nd Place (2 out of 267 teams, $10,000 awarded) (2021)
  • Research Scholarships of National University of Singapore (2019)
  • Alibaba Cloud Hackathon of Singapore 2nd Place (2 out of 20 teams) (2018)
  • Excellent Graduates of UESTC 2018 (Top 10%) (2018)

Teaching Experiences

  • Teaching Assistant of CS6204: Advanced Topics in Networking
    • NUS, 2024
  • Teaching Assistant of CS4226: Internet Architecture
    • NUS, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023
  • Teaching Assistant of CS2105: Introduction to Computer Networks
    • NUS, 2020, 2021

Talks

  • Invited talk at Flink Forward Asia, 2021 [link]

Professional Services

  • Reviewer of BigData 2024
  • Reviewer of FGCS 2024
  • External Reviewer of TPDS 2024
  • External Reviewer of DASFAA 2024
  • External Reviewer of ICPP 2023
  • External Reviewer of S&C 2023
  • External reviewer of ICPP 2022
  • External reviewer of SIGKDD 2022
  • External reviewer of ICPP 2021
  • External reviewer of TPDS 2021
  • Reviewer of ICDCS Workshop 2021
  • Reviewer of CCGrid 2021