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Dakai Kang

@dakaikang

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Ph.D. student and distributed-systems researcher specializing in high-performance BFT consensus and blockchain.

United States

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What I'm looking for

I seek research-focused engineering roles in distributed systems or blockchain where I can design scalable, fault-tolerant consensus, collaborate with research teams, and mentor engineers.

I am a Ph.D. candidate in Computer Science at the University of California, Davis, focused on high-performance, fault-tolerant distributed systems and blockchain technologies. My research centers on BFT consensus, concurrency, scheduling, and scalable ledger architectures.

I have designed and implemented novel consensus and scheduling mechanisms that improve throughput and latency; my HotStuff-1 and Fair-DAG works were accepted to SIGMOD 2025 and VLDB 2026 respectively. I contributed architecture and C++ implementations to ResilientDB under Apache incubation.

In industry, I built transaction-scheduling frameworks and a pipelined integration of Mysticeti consensus with a parallel EVM in Rust at Mysten Labs, and delivered full-stack features using Django and MySQL during a software engineering internship. I collaborate closely with systems research scientists and engineering teams.

I also engage in the research community as an invited and external reviewer across top venues and support education as a teaching assistant for database and distributed-ledger courses at UC Davis. I seek roles where I can advance reliable, high-throughput distributed systems and mentor engineering efforts.

Experience

Work history, roles, and key accomplishments

Research Intern

Mysten Labs

Jun 2025 - Sep 2025 (3 months)

Designed transaction scheduling frameworks for parallel execution and developed a pipelined workflow integrating Mysticeti consensus with a parallel EVM in Rust, collaborating with systems research scientists.

Rust Git

Software Engineer Intern

Hangzhou Zhuxing Information Technology Co., Ltd.

Jul 2020 - Oct 2020 (3 months)

Designed and developed a WeApp (Zhuxing Fourth Official Report System) from scratch to improve referee efficiency and performed full-stack development including Django and MySQL.

HTML CSS JavaScript Django MySQL Full Stack Developer

Education

Degrees, certifications, and relevant coursework

University of California, Davis

Doctor of Philosophy, Computer Science

2022 -

Activities and societies: Teaching assistant for database and distributed systems courses; research and publications in consensus and distributed ledger systems.

Ph.D. in Computer Science candidate focusing on high-performance fault-tolerant distributed systems and consensus protocols; expected completion June 2026.