Summary

Product Engineering Leader with a track record of delivering green-field software in complex domains within global organizations. More than 20 years of hands-on experience spanning consumer fintech, global financial services, and cloud platforms. Experienced in and passionate about building & growing high-performing agile software delivery teams.


Professional Experience

Endowus Singapore

Chief Technology Officer
Oct 2021 – now

Responsible for all aspects of technology including software development velocity & scalability; production security, stability, and spend; talent attraction and retention; risk and compliance policies & controls; build vs buy; budgets & forecasts; and more.

Scaled the org from ~30 to ~70 engineers while building, organising & reorganising our teams, processes, and systems even as our business went international, our client base grew 3x, and our assets grew to more than S$5 billion. Spearheaded incepting & operationalizing Endowus’ first overseas engineering office at Hyderabad, India.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) Singapore

Senior Manager, Solutions Architecture
Mar 2021 – Sep 2021

As Head of Developer SA (DevAx) for ASEAN, I led a distributed team of Solutions Architects to help software developers across ASEAN make an impact and be successful with AWS. Focussing on cloud native technologies, this newly created team delivered multiple in-account customer engagements as well as technical talks at AWS Summit and local meetups.

JPMorgan Chase & Co Singapore

Executive Director
May 2013 – Feb 2021

Global Product Lead for Observability & Chaos Engineering Services within the Platform Services group that builds & operates the firm’s strategic private cloud named Gaia.

In this role, I have:

  • Built from ground-up a diverse team of 25+ multi-skilled software engineers, organized as cross-functional squads that deliver highly impactful products using agile principles & practices.
  • Owned the vision, strategy, engineering, delivery, customer experience, operations, and risk & controls for multiple products: Observability Fabric, Chaos engineering framework, Canary synthetics framework, SSO Open Service Brokers, Audit & Financial Advisors, MariaDB database management web console, and Go, the firm’s link shortening & discovery service.
  • Influenced the firm’s strategy on initiatives like Identity, Service Mesh & Telemetry as a member of the Architecture Board.
  • Regularly presented to senior management including CIOs & GTOC members as well as internal and external clients on Cloud strategy, observability & telemetry, microservices design & chaos engineering.
  • Established guidelines & developed tooling for agile software delivery using CI/CD practices for Java, Python, JavaScript and Go.
  • Seeded a culture of shared improvement between platform providers & consumers using internal open source development.
  • Filed four patents, trained software developers & facilitated lateral and direct recruitment efforts at conferences and universities.

Before March 2016, I was Team Lead in the Securities Core Processing Platform group that was developing a new positioning and settlement system to handle firm-wide STP flows for Equities and Fixed Income, using Large Scale Scrum (LLeSS) process across multiple teams & regions.

As technical lead, some of the major projects that I delivered:

  • AME Operations Dashboard – Service for Operations users to monitor & resolve trade settlement exceptions. Built as a realtime, reactive service using C#/WPF frontend, Java backend & Caplin’s Liberator middleware.
  • Falcon Realtime Datamart – Service providing snapshots of 40 million stock positions, 15 million cash positions & 15 million open trades in less than 5 minutes. Built using Lightbend’s Akka Framework.
  • Contractual Settlement Engine – Converted the end of day contractual settlement process into a realtime operation using microservices architecture.

Citibank Singapore

Assistant Vice President
May 2009 – Apr 2013

Senior Engineer in the High Touch Sales Trading front-office development team within Citi Equities Technology. Worked in a team of four that developed PTE – the primary trading system used by Citi’s Program Trading desk globally.

  • On-boarded the Program Trading desk onto two new exchanges, collaborating with desk traders and the market connectivity teams.
  • Built a FIX to Proprietary messaging adapter that allowed 70MM$ notional daily order flow to be routed to smaller markets and also serve as a failover route to the larger markets.
  • Migrated dozens of Java services and Perl/Shell scripts from Solaris to Linux yielding infra cost savings of $90K/year.
  • Spearheaded the Development Maturity Model, a development efficiency improvement program within Global Equities. Raised team’s score by 54%.

Before 2012, worked in the Equities Technology Common Components team building shared Java libraries & services.

  • Implemented order management APIs within OES, the in-house state management library for orders and executions.
  • Developed an automated functional testing suite for Central Locate Service & increased test coverage from 20% to 80%.
  • Did several profile guided optimizations using YourKit that led to sub-millisecond response times.
  • Trained 40+ people within APAC on Quantum, Citi’s internal high-performance Java application server.
  • Provided guidance on FIX messaging messaging usage for on-boarding several new Equity trading exchanges.
  • Wrote a new Reporting GUI in Swing which provides traders a realtime view of stock borrow inventory. Uses JMX.

Hiperware Singapore

R&D Engineer, Product Specialist
Jan 2007 – Apr 2009

Hiperware is focussed on creating tools and solutions that enable developers to create complex, high-performance and scalable applications that run on multi-core and multi-cpu distributed platforms.

  • Managed core product development leading a team of two developers.
  • Instituted processes for bug tracking, version control and release management.
  • Single-handedly managed product deployments at multiple sites.
  • Conducted developer training workshops & technical sales presentations in Japan, USA and Malaysia.

Borland Singapore

R&D Engineer
Jul 2005 – Dec 2006

Borland VisiBroker is the most widely deployed CORBA ORB server for developing robust distributed computing applications.

  • Member of the Borland VisiBroker for C++ core development team.
  • Implemented the Realtime CORBA specificationfor realtime response requirements in VisiBroker 7.0
  • Transitioned development and support for the VisiBroker-RT product from US to Singapore.
  • Setup a realtime systems development lab in Singapore for testing on VxWorks and Montavista platforms.

Bioinformatics Institute Singapore

Research Associate
Sep 2004 – Jun 2005

The Bioinformatics Institute is a Singapore government funded agency focussing on computational biology and bioinformatics research. Worked as an intern while pursuing Masters degree and subsequently joined as a full time Research Associate after graduation.

  • Member of the Information Science Research group.
  • Designed a new machine learning based algorithm for the computational prediction of subcellular localization of proteins.
  • Implemented a cluster-backed parallel implementation of the above algorithm, along with a web based query interface.

Personal Projects

2009 – 2013

In late 2009, developed and released Cabbie, the first taxi booking Android application for Singapore. It combined the taxi company's SMS booking functionality with GPS based address geolocation to make cab booking a simple experience. Since launch, Cabbie and its paid upgrade Cabbie Pro, have been downloaded by more than 50,000 users making them some of the most popular applications in the class.

2008 – 2011

oohEmbed.com was conceived as a web-based API that would make it easy to embed content like videos, pictures, etc., from third-party sites in HTML pages. It was developed on the (then nascent) Google App Engine platform and went on to reach an average volume of nearly a million API requests per day. It was sold to Embed.ly Inc. in June 2011.

2008 – 2009

NextBus was a mobile web application and companion API that made it easy to track bus arrival times in Singapore. Launched in September 2008, the app received enthusiastic reception leading to wide-spread use and integration in several third-party apps.


Education

AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate

Amazon Web Services

May 2021
Certified Kubernetes Application Developer

Cloud Native Computing Foundation

Jan 2021
Certified LeSS Practitioner

The LeSS Company

Jul 2020
Expert Engineer

JPMorgan Chase

2016 – 2017
Lean Kanban Foundation

Kanban University

Oct 2014
Certified Scrum Developer

Scrum Alliance

Jul 2011
M.S., High Performance Computation for Engineered Systems

Singapore-MIT Alliance, Singapore

2003 – 2004
B.Tech., Aerospace Engineering

Indian Institute of Technology Madras, India

1999 – 2003