--- id: "resume-en" surface: "resume" locale: "en" title: "Zheng Li (李征) — Developer & AI Product Builder" description: "Zheng Li (李征), Principal Software Engineering Manager in Microsoft Teams, building developer-facing and AI-native software. Tongji University CS graduate; open-source maintainer." socialHeading: "Zheng Li" socialLabel: "Principal Software\nEngineering Manager\nat Microsoft" socialImageAlt: "Zheng Li, Principal Software Engineering Manager at Microsoft, with a portrait." name: "Zheng Li (李征)" role: "Principal Software Engineering Manager @ Microsoft" tagline: "Engineering depth. Global product experience.\nLeading the shift to AI-native development." canonical: "https://lizheng.dev/en/" copyright: "© {year} Zheng Li. All rights reserved." --- Zheng Li (李征) is a Principal Software Engineering Manager in Microsoft Teams and a Tongji University computer science graduate, with deep experience in product engineering, systems architecture and AI-native development. See also [Play on lizheng.me](https://lizheng.me/en/), the [Journal at lizheng.blog](https://lizheng.blog/), [software portfolio at hexly.ai](https://hexly.ai/) and [Basalt UI components at basaltui.com](https://basaltui.com/). ## Professional Summary ### Engineering leader pioneering AI-native development I am a Principal Software Engineering Manager in Microsoft Teams, with deep software development and systems architecture experience built through global product delivery across web, mobile, cloud services and data systems. As an IC, I design architectures, implement critical code and resolve performance and reliability problems, independently taking complex systems from problem definition to verified delivery. As a manager, I develop people by working through real engineering problems alongside them, helping them build technical judgment and the ability to deliver independently. I manage dozens of agents in daily engineering work, exploring and applying an AI software factory approach through intensive use of multiple models and agent harnesses. I organize task decomposition, context management, implementation, review and automated verification into repeatable workflows, making generated results checkable and correctable and delivering reliable software at scale. Lower execution costs let me test more alternatives; I remain responsible for architecture, acceptance and long-term quality. ## Work Experience ### Microsoft Principal Software Engineering Manager 2012 - Present · Beijing Currently working in Microsoft Teams. - Progressed from SDE through SDE II, Senior SDE and Senior Engineering Manager to Principal Software Engineering Manager. - Hold a dedicated remit to drive AI-native development and Frontier Team transformation across my team and the wider organization, spanning three organizational levels. Serve as a technical advisor to senior leadership on transformation strategy and key engineering decisions. - Built and led a multidisciplinary team across mobile, web, data and backend services, with ownership spanning user experience through production operations. - Designed and evolved client and service architectures across multiple platforms, balancing performance, reliability and maintainability as requirements and dependencies changed. - Built data pipelines, experimentation infrastructure, monitoring and CI/CD workflows to connect development decisions with production behavior and user feedback. - Partnered with product and business teams on priorities and delivery, working through technical constraints and dependencies across organizations. - Rank among Microsoft's top 100 employees by AI token consumption, with intensive daily use across implementation, testing, review and documentation. Develop repeatable workflows and share lessons from real delivery. - Version requirements, design decisions and acceptance criteria with code; define agent roles, context budgets and handoffs for work across sessions. Verify system behavior with automated checks and human judgment proportionate to risk, and investigate failures, rework and omissions. - Evaluate technical choices against the total cost of execution, review, rework and maintenance; use prototypes and feedback to reduce uncertainty. ### Alibaba Group – UED Team 2010 - 2012 - Built internal and open-source tools using web technologies across client and server components. - Focused on developer productivity and data visualization. ### Microsoft Research Asia Summer Intern 2005, 2007 - Completed two summer internships in data visualization research and development. - Developed interactive prototypes using JavaScript and Silverlight. ## Education ### Tongji University M.Eng. in Computer Software and Theory (Distributed Systems) 2010 ### Tongji University B.Eng. in Computer Science and Technology 2007 ## Patent [CN103248610 A](https://patents.google.com/patent/CN103248610A) — Mobile search UI/UX innovation (2013) ## Leadership & Communication I value people and the relationships and trust built through working together. I take colleagues' circumstances, motivations and concerns seriously, and lead through clear goals, explicit responsibilities and decisions people can understand. I set a shared quality bar while respecting individual experience and autonomy. Fluent in Chinese and English, I have worked extensively with teams in the US, India and Israel, connecting technical detail with business priorities and resolving differences across teams. I lead AI transformation by testing new methods with the team, building trust through real results and sustained dialogue rather than management directives alone. I want people and AI to work well together: technology should extend people's capabilities while preserving their judgment, creativity and opportunities to grow. I make room for learning, experimentation, timely feedback and honest discussion of failures, giving engineers a real role in shaping how work changes. ## Beyond Work Outside work, I actively develop open-source software, contribute to the community and maintain an extensive portfolio of personal open-source projects. I turn ideas into usable software, test engineering decisions through real use and ongoing maintenance, and share code and lessons openly. I write regularly about systems design, human–AI collaboration and technical leadership, including failed approaches and revisions to my own thinking. I care about the experience a system creates: whether it clarifies a problem, removes unnecessary effort and gives people more freedom to act. The same standard guides my approach to productivity: leaving more time and attention for thinking, creating and life beyond work. ## Links - [lizheng.blog](https://lizheng.blog/) - [x.com/zhengli](https://x.com/zhengli) - [linkedin.com/in/nocoo](https://linkedin.com/in/nocoo) - [github.com/nocoo](https://github.com/nocoo)