Bill Zuo (Yunfei Zuo)

About Me

I am a tech executive and distributed systems architect with over 20 years of experience designing and scaling high-throughput backends, telemetry pipelines, and AI systems. Based in Los Altos, California, I am currently the Founder & CEO at Softprobe.

The Problem: The Observability "Indexing Tax"

Enterprises throw away billions in valuable data every single day. Why? Because storing 1 GB of raw telemetry in object storage costs a few cents, but making that same 1 GB searchable in a traditional observability warehouse often costs hundreds of dollars.

This massive indexing tax forces engineering teams into a vicious compromise: sampling 90% of their data away to stay within budget, only to fly completely blind when complex incidents or AI agent failures occur in production.

The Softprobe Thesis: Context Over Index

AI cannot operate software or perform root-cause triage without complete runtime context. At Softprobe, we are pioneering a fundamental architectural shift:

• Capture once, keep forever (cheap): Full OpenTelemetry traces and agent run evidence live in lake-backed storage (DuckLake). Evidence is never a temporary cache.
• Session Graph & Directed Acyclic Graphs (DAGs): Instead of treating telemetry as disconnected flat text logs, we correlate sessions into structured graphs.
• Derived, rebuildable summaries: A lightweight catalog layer manages fast session triage, while the lake remains the uncompromised source of truth.

Recognitions & Milestones

Engineering Philosophy

"Context Engineering is not about stacking prompts. The magic is in the system design — the historical decisions, the constraints, and the durable evidence."

Connect

I enjoy connecting with engineers, founders, and researchers grappling with distributed storage, agent QA, or telemetry bottlenecks:

• Connect on LinkedIn (yunfeizuo)
• Follow on X / Twitter (@billzwo)
• Explore code on GitHub (@zwobill)
• Read Softprobe's open source projects on github.com/softprobe