Career Profile
Engineering leader with 17+ years building and scaling distributed platforms across APAC, with deep focus on real-time transaction systems, monetization, and engagement platforms. Currently VP of Engineering at YouTrip, leading a fintech platform processing $15B+ in annual transactions across Singapore, Thailand, Malaysia, and Australia with 70+ engineers across four countries. Previously spent 8 years at Carousell, scaling engineering to 150+ across Singapore, India, and Indonesia. Built Carousell’s monetization platform from a $0 function into a multi-market revenue engine spanning ads, subscriptions, recommendations, and seller-facing products, growing daily revenue 30x. Drove platformization of payments, subscriptions, and APIs into a reusable event-driven distributed backbone, and led the integration of Laku6 (acquired Indonesian recommerce platform) into the core stack. In the final year, drove org-wide GenAI adoption, sustaining and lifting development velocity through a deliberate team scale-down. Passionate about technical excellence, building high-performing globally-distributed teams, and modernizing engineering practices through GenAI-assisted development, observability, and secure SDLC.
Experiences
- Own platform strategy, architecture, and engineering execution across four markets (Singapore, Thailand, Malaysia, Australia), partnering directly with the CEO and exec team.
- Leading 70+ engineers across Singapore, India, Hong Kong, and Indonesia on a proprietary multi-market fintech platform processing $15B+ in annual transactions.
- Reduced critical 5xx transaction errors by 31%+ through targeted reliability engineering on a high-throughput transaction processing platform.
- Driving GenAI adoption across development, testing, and code review workflows to lift engineering productivity and code quality.
- Strengthening secure SDLC, observability, and operational governance across a regulated fintech environment.
- Established the Engineering Career Ladder framework, creating clear growth pathways and coaching engineering managers on people leadership and talent development.
- Led 50+ engineers and product managers across 3 platform teams in Singapore, India, and Indonesia, managing through EMs and Tech Leads, with quarterly OKRs driving 90%+ delivery success.
- Drove platformization of payments, subscriptions, recommendations, and API layers into a reusable event-driven, API-first distributed backbone, reducing time-to-integration for new market launches.
- Led the integration of Laku6 (acquired Indonesian recommerce platform) into Carousell’s core platform, aligning architectures, payment rails, and data systems across markets while preserving local operating model.
- Owned integrations with external payment rails, financial invoicing systems, and market-specific APIs across Indonesia and Singapore, managing complex data reconciliation and high-volume transaction flows at scale.
- Instituted ML-powered monetization, recommendation, and ranking systems, directly impacting revenue and user engagement across multiple markets.
- Drove deep GenAI adoption across the engineering org (Copilot, Cursor, Claude Code, internal LLM-assisted code review and test generation tooling), maintaining and improving development velocity through a deliberate team scale-down by offsetting reduced headcount with AI-leveraged productivity gains.
- Shipped AI-powered internal products including LLM-assisted listing categorization, content moderation, fraud signal extraction, and seller assistant tooling, replacing manual operational workflows and reducing trust & safety review load substantially.
- Established engineering norms for GenAI use (prompt patterns, code review gating, security guardrails, eval frameworks) so AI-assisted output met production quality bars.
- Led deep cloud infrastructure optimization achieving ~50% cost reduction through compute, storage, and network restructuring, improving platform economics for international growth.
- Owned hiring, retention, and development of senior engineering talent across Singapore, India, and Indonesia, sustaining a strong leadership layer of EMs and senior ICs accountable for platform delivery.
- Elevated Carousell’s engineering brand through tech blogs, podcasts, webinars, and conference talks.
- Scaled engineering organization to 150+ people; directly managed 70+ engineers across Merchants, Trust & Safety, and Properties verticals.
- Owned engineering for the paying-merchant portfolio and monetization platform across Southeast Asia, scaling revenue infrastructure that originated as a $0 function in 2017 into a multi-market engagement and monetization engine.
- Built and mentored the leadership layer (EMs and senior ICs) that allowed the org to scale beyond founder-led structures, with structured career ladders and growth plans.
- Partnered with Product and Data Science to deliver monetization, recommendation, and engagement features improving ARPU and user retention across verticals.
- Scaled infrastructure for high-traffic, multi-region workloads; operationalized experimentation frameworks and event-driven pipelines for ML model integration into production.
- Reduced time-to-ship by ~20% through CI/CD pipeline improvements, observability investments, and engineering excellence practices across distributed Singapore and India teams.
- Raised Carousell’s engineering brand through external tech talks, internal podcasts, and 10+ published engineering blogs.
- Joined Carousell to build the monetization function from zero, establishing it as a core engineering vertical and growing daily revenue 30x across listings, ads, subscriptions, and paid placements.
- Led the transition from external ad inventory (Google/FB) to Carousell’s first owned internal ad products and paid placements, building the marketplace monetization stack from the ground up.
- Led Listing Quota, one of Carousell’s most significant monetization initiatives. Managed 24 direct/indirect reports across local and remote teams; partnered with Product, Data, and Finance on pricing models and experimentation.
- Championed CI/CD transformation and platform reliability, contributing to 15% faster deployment cycles and reduced production incidents.
- Established a weekly app release cadence to accelerate feature rollout and improve time-to-market.
- Oversaw the management and maintenance of single sign-on (SSO) for 30 websites, ensuring seamless user experience and security across multiple platforms.
- Led scrum planning and bi-weekly sprint meetings, providing clear direction and guidance to team members to achieve project objectives on time and within budget.
- Effectively coordinated with an offshore team in India, promoting collaboration and cross-functional communication to drive successful project outcomes.
- Developed REST APIs to enable decoupled website architecture using Drupal for Today Online, leveraging hands-on experience with Microsoft Azure and Acquia platforms to achieve high performance and scalability.
- Implemented integration and sanity tests for the SSO platform, ensuring the stability and reliability of the system for end-users.
- Managed the tracking, deployment, and integration of new releases in the environment using Software Configuration Management (SCM) tools, ensuring consistency and accuracy across the development and production environments.
- Automated deployment and release processes, streamlining the delivery of new features and reducing time-to-market.
- Facilitated effective communication and collaboration between multiple teams, ensuring alignment and coordination of project objectives and priorities.
- Led the automation of the release management process, reducing time-to-market and improving product quality.
- Coordinated with offshore teams and various stakeholders, fostering collaboration and driving successful project outcomes.
- Designed and implemented custom CI infrastructure for deployments, smoke, and nightly system test loops, enabling efficient and high-quality software development.
- Implemented effective project management strategies, including agile methodologies and quality assurance processes, to ensure successful project outcomes and maximize team productivity.
- Responsible for development estimates, software design and architecture reviews.
- Introduced the culture of release management.
- Supported EM for executing scrum and retro practices.
- Introduced agile to the team.
- Led a team of approx. 5 engineers to build secure subscription-based WordPress solutions for financial blogs.
- Built and integrated SSO for various Investing channel applications.
- Integration of google ad network (then double click).
- Developed ad tech solutions for Investing Channel in ruby on rails and PHP.
- Onboard new clients to our subscription platform.
- Built a SASS solution for the vehicle-tracking system used for patrolling an area.
- Managed and maintained cloud-based systems such as various VPS and their networks.
- Localization support was built to support various languages.
- Designed websites for small and local businesses.
- Responsible for developing and implementing package handling processes.
- Managed various clients, while I was in University.
- Managing across platforms.