_intro

about me #

I am a engineering leader with over two decades of experience in designing, building, and delivering mission-critical, high-availability systems across diverse domains, including finance, public sector, and smart city initiatives. My expertise spans full-stack development, cloud-native architectures, and DevOps, with a proven track record of leading global teams to deliver scalable, secure, and innovative solutions. I am passionate about engineering excellence, fostering collaborative team cultures, and driving impactful outcomes for public good.

UOB #

Currently, as First Vice President at UOB’s Group Enterprise Banking, I lead a team of over 20 developers in delivering a comprehensive payment system that has transformed UOB’s Asia operations. This project, the largest in the department’s history, introduced 20x more payment product features, achieved 99% environment availability, and met stringent engineering KPIs. By leveraging AI tools for productivity and implementing robust governance practices—such as database standards, code quality gates, and security protocols—I ensure high-quality, compliant, and maintainable systems.

My time at UOB has been a significant learning experience, where I successfully led a team to deliver a complex, high-impact payment system despite challenging circumstances. However, the engineering culture has been difficult, with a heavy reliance on contract staff, unrealistic management expectations, and an intense work schedule that often extended from 10 AM to 10 PM, six days a week. I’m seeking an environment where sustainable engineering practices, long-term team growth and mission-driven impact align more closely with my values.

Beyond Limtit #

I was leading a global software development team and developing a new big data industrial SaaS platform from scratch. But they shutdown Singapore team.

GovTech #

My experience at GovTech, working as a Lead Solution Architect at the Ministry of Manpower, was highly valuable. I contributed to the Whole of Government security program, cloud onboarding initiatives, and system integrations across MOM projects and other agencies, while also overseeing vendor deliverables to ensure timely and compliant implementations. However, the role was heavily focused on vendor management, which limited my ability to engage directly in hands-on implementation work where I believe I can add the most value. Additionally, the departure of my manager, who originally brought me to GovTech, prompted me to reassess my career path. I’m excited to return to GovTech in a role like this one, where I can leverage my technical expertise and leadership experience to directly drive product development, foster engineering excellence, and contribute to impactful public sector solutions.

JP Morgan #

As a team lead in Asia payment feature team, I have successfully implemented, delivered, and supported a new global unified payment processing system, which is a large microservices application. The team successfully launched the first release in Asia/Indonesia and recently completed a betalaunch of the first real-time payment processing system in Asia/Malaysia.

NCS #

For IntelliSurf, work as a lead solution architect with the production team, provide technical solutions for the product, build POCs and skeletons, from frontend to backend, from containerization to data streaming.

For MOE iExam project, work as project technical owner, lead the whole project development team, a major contributor to the design spec, framework design, schema design, system architecture, and all technical related deliverables.

career goal #

My career goal is to lead high-impact technical teams in a mission-driven organization like GovTech, where I can drive the delivery of innovative, scalable solutions that address critical public sector challenges. My focus remains on aligning technical strategies with business goals. Drawing from my experience leading complex projects, I’m excited to contribute to GovTech’s vision by shaping technical strategies, mentoring engineers, and building products that create meaningful impact for communities, while continuing to grow as a technical leader in cloud-native and full-stack development.

about engineering #

• Morden challenges:

  • Moore’s Law: the processing power doubles every 18 months
  • Butter’s Law: the amount of data communication through a single optical fiber doubles every 9 months
  • Kryder’s Law: the amount of data stored per centimeter square of a hard drive double every 13 months

• what is a good product

  1. its working
  2. its easy to use
  3. people love to use it

I would take architecture or software as a product, for a good one, it must answer the hardest problems in order to achieve the project goal, developers and team love to use it

• it enables people to extend it and add values
• it has feedback loop and evolveing
• for design, it is not just on paper, it comes with actual and nice underlying building blocks
• kiss, as we are facing so many different and complicated technologies and business problems, this is super important to identify the most fundamental and difficult issues and building scalable solution for it, easy to say but hard to do, 99% of software projects are killed by complexity.

about leadership #

• setting up clear goal and milestones
• leading by example, having actionable plan
• en-powering people by knowledge and information, not just giving instruction only but also share the thoughts behind and inspire team to go further, promoting knowledge sharing culture and follow good practice and technologies

stakeholder and conflict management #

case1 UOB #

Situation: At UOB, I led a team tasked with developing a bulk payment processing system to handle 50,000 payments in 20 minutes across 100 file formats, replacing a legacy system. The team, primarily composed of inexperienced contract staff, had to build on an existing microservices stack without big data technologies like Kafka. The database emerged as a performance bottleneck, as the existing max payment transaction per batch is 50. Stakeholders, including business users demanding high throughput, a director pushing for reusable components, and infrastructure teams limiting technology choices, had conflicting priorities, creating tension around delivery timelines and technical feasibility.

Task: My responsibility was to align these diverse stakeholder expectations, resolve conflicts, and deliver a scalable solution that met business requirements while ensuring team cohesion and technical quality. I needed to design a system that balanced performance, reusability, and compliance within the constraints of an inexperienced team and limited infrastructure.

Action: I initiated a collaborative approach to manage stakeholders and conflicts:

Stakeholder Engagement: I organized regular syncs with business users, the director, and infrastructure teams to clarify requirements and constraints. I translated business needs (e.g., 50,000 payments in 20 minutes) into technical specifications and communicated infrastructure limitations (no Kafka) to set realistic expectations.

Conflict Resolution: When the director’s push for reusable components clashed with the business team’s urgency for rapid delivery, I facilitated trade-off discussions. I proposed a modular design using Apache Camel and Spring Batch, which allowed reusable components (e.g., file parsers for 100 formats) while prioritizing performance. To address the database bottleneck, I worked with the domain architect to optimize SQL queries and implement batch processing patterns, reducing transaction overhead.

Team Enablement: Recognizing the team’s inexperience, I introduced hands-on mentoring sessions and pair programming to upskill members on Camel and Spring Batch. I also established clear coding guidelines and peer reviews to maintain quality under pressure.

Technical Solutioning: To resolve the database bottleneck, I led a POC iteration, incorporating indexing, connection pooling, and Liquibase for schema management, improving throughput from 15,000 payments in 30 seconds to meeting the 50,000 in 20 minutes target. I ensured compliance with financial regulations by embedding audit and logging standards.

Expectation Management: When infrastructure constraints limited scalability, I presented data-driven trade-offs to stakeholders, using POC results to advocate for incremental improvements and gain buy-in for prioritized features.

Result: The project was delivered on time, processing 50,000 payments in 20 minutes across 100 file formats, meeting business requirements. The modular design satisfied the director’s reusability goals, enabling future extensions. The team’s skills improved significantly, with 90% of members contributing to critical features by the project’s end. Stakeholder conflicts were resolved through transparent communication and data-backed solutions, fostering trust and alignment. The system achieved 99% availability during testing and maintained compliance with financial regulations, contributing to UOB’s largest-ever payment system transformation. This experience reinforced my ability to navigate complex stakeholder dynamics, drive technical excellence, and deliver impactful solutions under challenging condition.

case 2: JP Morgan #

Situation: In my role as Vice President at JP Morgan, I led the Asia payment feature team in implementing a real-time payment processing system in Malaysia, a groundbreaking initiative for the region. A critical component was developing compliance reports to meet emerging government regulations, which were not fully defined. Business stakeholders provided unclear requirements, expecting rapid delivery of comprehensive reports. On the technical side, the existing reporting system relied on a legacy setup that pulled data from multiple sources and manipulated it inefficiently, without a dedicated report engine. The reporting component team resisted changes, citing the complexity of customizing reports for the new system. Additionally, limited support from my director complicated stakeholder alignment, as differing mindsets among team members and business users created friction.

Task: My responsibility was to align business and technical stakeholders, resolve conflicts arising from unclear requirements and team resistance, and deliver a scalable reporting solution that met compliance needs while ensuring future adaptability. I needed to balance immediate delivery pressures with long-term technical quality, all while maintaining team cohesion and stakeholder trust.

Action: I took a structured approach to manage stakeholders and resolve conflicts:

Stakeholder Engagement: I initiated workshops with business users to clarify compliance reporting needs, acknowledging the evolving regulatory landscape. By breaking down requirements into prioritized phases, I gained their agreement to focus on critical reports in the first phase, deferring less-defined features to later iterations.

Conflict Resolution with Component Team: The reporting team’s resistance to customization stemmed from concerns about legacy system complexity. I facilitated technical discussions to understand their constraints and proposed decoupling the reporting structure from the legacy system. This involved designing a modular data aggregation layer that could pull and process data independently, reducing dependencies and enabling future flexibility.

Technical Solutioning: Collaborating with the domain architect, I architected a solution using a lightweight data pipeline to aggregate resources from disparate systems, avoiding the need for a full report engine. I introduced standardized data transformation logic to replace the legacy’s “nasty” manipulations, improving maintainability. To address the component team’s concerns, I provided clear documentation and conducted pair-programming sessions to ease adoption of the new structure.

Expectation Management: I maintained transparent communication with stakeholders, presenting trade-offs (e.g., phased delivery vs. immediate comprehensive reports) backed by prototypes showing improved report generation times. Despite limited director support, I leveraged my relationships with business and technical leads to build consensus, ensuring alignment on priorities.

Team Enablement: To bridge differing mindsets, I organized cross-functional syncs to foster collaboration and conducted training on the new reporting architecture, empowering the team to handle future requirement changes confidently.

Result: The first phase of compliance reports was delivered on schedule, meeting critical regulatory needs and earning business stakeholder approval for the phased approach. The decoupled reporting structure reduced data processing time by 40% compared to the legacy system and enabled scalability for future regulatory updates. The reporting component team adopted the new architecture, with 80% of members contributing to subsequent enhancements, overcoming initial resistance. Stakeholder trust was strengthened through transparent communication and iterative delivery, aligning business and technical goals. This experience demonstrated my ability to navigate ambiguous requirements, resolve team conflicts, and drive technical innovation under pressure, skills I’m eager to apply to GovTech’s mission-driven projects.

Questions #

• Role:

  • is this a new role or replacement?
  • What are the challenges of this position?
  • What are the big problems the team faces right now？

• Tech Culture:

  • How do you test the system?
  • What are your most important software product metrics?
  • How to identify and track the bug and what do you do after a production incident?
  • how to balance among open source, vendor tenologies and inhouse development?
  • How to plan and manage technical goals and business goals?
  • What is the decision making process? How are the technical decisions made and communicated?