Tao Zhu is a software engineer and researcher specializing in large-scale machine learning systems at Google. He is currently a Software Engineer on Meta's Superintelligence team, which he joined in July 2025. ^[1]

Education

Zhu attended Tsinghua University from 1999 to 2006, where he completed both his Bachelor of Science and Master of Science degrees. Following his time at Tsinghua, he moved to the United States to pursue his doctoral studies. From 2006 to 2010, he was a PhD student at the University of Southern California (USC), where he earned a PhD in Computer Science. His doctoral advisor at USC was Viktor K. Prasanna. ^{[2] [1] [3]}

Career

Tao Zhu has approximately 15 years of experience in the technology industry, with a focus on machine learning and distributed systems. According to his OpenReview profile, he began working as a researcher at Google in 2010. Over the course of his career, he has held senior engineering roles at several major technology companies, including Twitter and Dropbox.

Prior to his current role, Zhu was a Senior Staff Engineer at Google's DeepMind. In early July 2025, he left DeepMind to join Meta as a Software Engineer. He is a member of the company's recently assembled "Superintelligence" team, a group focused on foundational research and development in advanced artificial intelligence. His work on this team centers on the development of large-scale machine learning systems.

Throughout his career, Zhu has developed expertise in several areas within computer science and artificial intelligence. His primary specialization is in large-scale machine learning systems. His other documented areas of expertise include:

• Computer Vision;
• Deep Learning;
• Recommender Systems;
• Distributed Systems;
• Semantic Web.

These areas of focus reflect his work in both academic research and industrial application at companies like Google, DeepMind, and Meta. ^{[2] [1] [3] [4]}