ARISE — Researcher Profiling
A vertical search engine for academic researchers. Data mining + ML under Prof. Kevin Chang, Forward Data Lab.
Available for interesting problems
Hong Cheng,
a coder,
an activist,
a team player.
Software engineer in Seattle. I build distributed systems and async workflows at scale — and care a lot about the people I build them with.
— Hong, somewhere warm
01 About
A short introduction.
I write code for a living and care about communities for the rest of the day.
After a Master's in CS at UIUC, I joined Amazon Web Services in Seattle — building the platforms behind AWS Application Discovery Service and then AWS Control Tower. From there: Dropbox's revenue platform, then leading a payments network team at ByteDance, and most recently Corporate Trust at Atlassian.
Before all that, I was the kid running the basketball tournament, directing the singing competition, and tutoring math on the side. I still believe the best engineers are the ones who learned how to organize a chaotic group of people first.
02 Work
Eight years, five teams.
Senior Software Engineer, Corporate Trust
Atlassian · Seattle · October 2025 – Present
2025 — Now
Corporate Trust
Senior Software Engineer · Atlassian · Seattle
Working on the systems that keep enterprise customers' data — and the trust that comes with it — safe at Atlassian's scale.
2024 — 2025
Payment Network
Tech Lead, Senior SDE · ByteDance · Seattle
Led a team building payments infrastructure at ByteDance — money movement, network integrations, the unglamorous plumbing that has to be perfectly reliable.
2021 — 2024
Revenue Platform · GTM Team
Senior SDE · Dropbox · Seattle
Building the systems that turn product usage into accurate, predictable revenue. Payments, billing, entitlements — the work nobody sees until it breaks.
2019 — 2021
AWS Control Tower
SDE · Amazon Web Services · Seattle
Account governance for multi-account AWS environments. Helped enterprises stand up landing zones with guardrails baked in from day one.
2018 — 2019
AWS Application Discovery Service
SDE · Amazon Web Services · Seattle
On-prem to cloud — the service that maps a customer's data center before they migrate it. Async pipelines, agent fleets, dependency graphs.
2016 — 2018
M.S. in Computer Science
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Data mining and machine learning. Built ARISE — a vertical search engine for profiling researchers — under Prof. Kevin Chang at Forward Data Lab.
2012 — 2016
B.S. in Math & Computer Science
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign · VP, CSSA
Interned at The Ninth City, IBM, and NewRank.cn while serving as Vice President of the Chinese Students and Scholars Association.
03 Projects
Things I made.
Group Study
A class project that helped students find study buddies — DB systems, web stack, the works.
CSSA Basketball Tournament
More than a website — a custom database of basketball stats designed from scratch. Three seasons running.
Ninth City / IBM / NewRank
Three internships, three very different stacks. Android games, enterprise tooling, and Chinese social-media analytics.
UIUC CSSA Website
Built for the org I served as VP. Lives on as a memento now — the community moved on, but the love remains.
GitHub @moneypro
Random side quests, weekend hacks, and the occasional thing I'm actually proud of. Mostly the first two.
04 Outside code
A second résumé.
2015
Director · Voice of Champaign
Directed a campus-wide singing competition. The cast lifted me into the air at the end. Still slightly embarrassed, still slightly proud.
Event · Stage
2013–15
Director · UIUC CSSA Basketball Tournament
Three seasons of directing — fourth as special director. Designed the website, ran the bracket, and gave it all on the court too.
Event · Sports
2014–15
Assistant Director · Moon Gala
The biggest annual event for the entire Chinese community in Champaign. Find me in the cast photo if you can.
Event · Culture
2014–16
Writer · Public I
Two articles: Raising Concerns about Chinese Students' Mental Health, and Tsinghua University and U of I — the first Chinese modern architect from U of I.
Writing
2014–17
Math Tutor · Office of Minority Student Affairs
Tutored math at OMSA at UIUC. Students kept coming back, and I kept turning down the private gigs.
Teaching
2014–16
Organizer · Ultimate Championship (eSports)
A Hearthstone legend, a Dota veteran, and a strategic-games fanatic. Ran the eSports tournament at UIUC for three years.
Event · eSports