Ho-Ki Au
Summary
Seasoned software engineering professional with proven success in building highly scalable solutions and leading and scaling software engineering teams. I have a combination of management, agile methodologies, technical skills, and lots of hands-on experience with multiple technology stacks. I have a successful track record of building highly scalable applications, mobile apps, machine learning, data analytics applications.
Experience
Linc Sunnyvale, CA, USA
With an award-winning conversational AI technology, Linc's SaaS platform provided automated customer care by chats over the web, email, SMS, and other channels. Linc also offered package tracking, product recommendation solutions for ecommerce shops. Linc powered customer care for global brands like Levi's, Kimberly Clark, Vineyard Vines, etc.
Senior Director of Engineering 6/2020 to date
  • Set the strategic vision and technical direction for engineering.
  • Led the engineering organization to develop NLP technology that seamlessly integrated with third-party customer care platforms like Salesforce, Zendesk, etc.
  • Implemented agile, lean engineering processes to focus on and iterate on the right solutions for problems.
  • Defined and delivered the KPIs for the engineering organization.
  • Partnered with Linc's engineering leadership and other departments to enhance overall productivity and product quality.
  • Led the planning and execution of key projects and the delivery of product features to key customers.
AfterShip Shenzhen, PRC
AfterShip was a SaaS platform for tracking shipments of packages by couriers around the world, such as UPS, DHL, Fedex, SF Express, etc. It served tens of millions of requests daily from the busiest e-commerce merchants in the world, e.g. Amazon, eBay, Shopify, Wish, etc.
VP of Engineering 8/2017 to 1/2020
  • Planned and directed engineering efforts in partnership with product and business teams. Led key engineering projects, initiatives and processes.
  • Designed architecture of cloud native systems based on microservices.
  • Designed data analytics pipelines to offer business insights to customers.
  • Recruited, trained, developed, coached and mentored software engineering and DevOps teams to build a scalable multi-tenanted SaaS platform.
  • Ensured technology platforms scaled effectively, performed well with growth and that products were released with minimal quality issues.
  • Prioritized Engineering activities in line with projected costs and benefits.
  • Partnered with executive colleagues to define and deliver the technical vision for the SaaS platform.
  • Inspired the technology team, resolved conflicts/issues efficiently and managed any performance issues as they arose.
  • Coordinated work efforts between Scrum teams at various locations.
Turnitin Oakland, CA, USA
Turnitin provided a SaaS platform for schools and universities across the world to engage students in the writing learning process. Its family of web applications provided ckecks for plagiarism against billions of paper submissions worldwide, personalized feedback, and assessment of student progress.
Senior Director of Engineering 1/2017 to 7/2017
  • Responsible for technical strategy and roadmap for software development, QA, build & release teams.
  • Drove technical design of SaaS product platform on a microservice architecture.
  • Developed and maintained tooling to provide CI/CD, rapid deployment on AWS and private cloud.
  • Designed processes and procedures to improve software quality, system availability and maintainability.
  • Aligned and mentored teams to collaborate in project activities using agile scrum methodology.
  • Worked with machine learning researchers to apply deep learning techniques in commercial products.
Pinganfang.com Shanghai, PRC
Pinganfang.com was one of the biggest online marketplaces for real estate and rentals in China. A subsidiary of PingAn Insurance Group's subsidiary, Pinganfang.com offered financial products to real estate buyers and investors.
General Manager of Technology Research and Development 6/2016 to 12/2016
  • Directed research and development teams for all of pinganfang.com's web sites and mobile apps.
  • Successfully implemented Scrum agile development method for all development projects.
  • Led exploration and research on emerging web and mobile technologies.
  • Applied react-native hybrid development model for mobile apps; greatly enhanced team productivity.
  • Migrated back-end systems to a micro-service architecture in order to improve overall system fault toleration.
EpaiLive Auctions Beijing, PRC
EpaiLive was Asia's largest online auction platform for antiques, artwork and collectibles. It broadcast video streams of live auctions as they happened globally. Users could use Epailive's platform to make offline bids, online live bids by web browsers or mobile apps.
Chief Technology Officer 1/2015 to 8/2015
  • Managed product development, QA, product management, and DevOps teams.
  • Managed development of web site and mobile app products in cost-effective way while maintaining good quality.
  • Implemented Scrum agile processes for product management, development and testing.
  • Implemented BDD and TDD for the development of the company's mobile app.
  • Progressively automated testing of company's e-commerce platform.
  • Trained team members on cutting-edge web, mobile and testing technologies.
  • Evaluated data analytics techniques to mine the company's massive amount of auction data.
  • Devised deployment strategy to make video streams of live bidding available around the world.
  • Collaborated with various departments to assess and recommend technologies that support company organizational needs.
Everbridge Inc. Beijing, PRC
The Beijing Development Center was the primary development center for US-based Everbridge Inc. Everbridge was a global leader in Unified Critical Communication SaaS platform, notifying millions of people globally about critical situations everyday.
Head of Development Center 6/2014 to 12/2014
  • Managed software development activities at the Development Center
  • Coordinated product development activities with team in the US.
  • Worked with fellow executives to decide on the company's product directions.
  • Project management through product life cycles.
  • Provided technical advice on product design and support issues.
Scientific Learning Corp Shanghai, PRC
At the R&D center in China of the US company Scientific Learning Corp, we developed the Reading Assistant browser application which used computer speech recognition technology to help children improve reading skills. We maintained hosted services for and provided technical support to Scientific Learning's customers in China.
Head of China Development 4/2010 to 12/2013
  • Solely responsible for establishing a WFOE subsidiary for Scientific Learning Corp in Shanghai, China.
  • Managed the budget for the subsidiary company in China.
  • Built the software engineering team of about 20 people which consisted of software developers and QA engineers with diversified sets of skills.
  • Led the software engineering team to create the Reading Assistant product which helped kids improve reading skills. As a HTML5 application, it featured a speech recognizer browser plug-in that worked on all browsers, and exposed a JavaScript API.
  • Delivered Reading Assistant product to users on a SAAS platform.
  • Designed the architecture of the mobile version of the Reading Assistant product for iOS and Android.
  • Designed the architecture of the RESTful server which served content to Reading Assistant and collected user study data for creating reports and data analytics.
  • Implemented the SCRUM agile software development process.
  • Led team to adopt behavior-driven development methodology, to ensure compliance of software behavior to specifications, and product robustness.
  • Set up and managed a DevOps team to host Scientific Learning's products on the Internet for users in China.
  • Automated system maintenance and software deployment by Puppet and Capistrano.
  • Worked closely with international re-sellers to ensure users' satisfaction with the company's products.
Saybot Inc. Shanghai, PRC
Saybot provided software technologies to help users learn and practice spoken English. Founded in 2004, Saybot aimed to serve the China market. Saybot won the Red Herring 100 Asia Award in 2008.
Chief Technology Officer 11/2004 to 3/2010
  • Was part of the executive team to decide on company direction and business strategies.
  • Successfully raised more than USD 8 million series-B funding in 2007.
  • Built and managed the software engineering and IT practices for the company.
  • Oversaw research and engineering activities.
  • Directed team to design and build Saybot's software products which featured state-of-the-art speech recognition technologies, and an online store of English learning materials.
  • Designed the architecture of a web-based distributed recognition system to assess speakers' levels of spoken English.
  • Applied machine learning techniques to classify English learners in different proficiency levels.
  • Built a browser plug-in which handled low-level audio devices and extracted speech features. The plug-in worked in IE and Firefox and scriptable by JavaScript.
  • Using the Sphinx recognizer, built a recognition server which exposed an FCGI interface and pluggable into most web servers, thereby leveraging their load-balancing and scalability features.
  • Worked with telecom companies and CDN providers to optimize deployment strategy.
  • Led engineering team to develop internal web-based tools to improve efficiency and accuracy of lesson content production.
  • Managed IT team to serve the 70-people company. We oversaw the internal network, hosted servers, windows domain, email, web site, and many other systems used internally.
  • Worked closely with other senior executives on product and business strategies, which led to the company's scoring strategic partnerships with leading English training institutions in China.
NorthStar Systems San Francisco, CA, USA
NorthStar was a provider of software applications to help financial institutions manage customers' portfolios.
Principal Engineer/Engineering Manager 4/2002 to 10/2004
  • Designed on a service-oriented architecture an extensible application platform where business objects, application logic and work flow could be easily extended and customized.
  • Designed the presentation generation web service to dynamically generate contents of text, tables and graphs in Microsoft PowerPoint.
  • Managed software engineering projects and activities.
Extricity Software Belmont, CA, USA
Extricity was a leading provider of b2b integration software applications. Its products linked computer systems of enterprises with those of the suppliers. Extricity was acquired by Peregrine Systems in 2001.
Technical Lead 7/1999 to 2/2002
  • Led the development of the business partner data exchange platform in Extricity's supply chain management system.
  • Designed the architecture of major features of Extricity's Integration Server, such as automatic adapter recovery, asynchronous operations, and support for distributed deployment of adapters.
  • Worked with IBM to make Websphere the run-time environment for Extricity's products which was not originally designed on J2EE.
  • Assisted customer support and professional services to resolve problems with Extricity's products.
Adaptivity, Inc. San Mateo, CA, USA
Adaptivity developed a software platform technology which enabled enterprise applications to be developed and customized rapidly.
Technical Lead 6/1997 to 3/1999
  • Led a team of engineers to develop a product management application on Adaptivity's software platform which was similar to J2EE before J2EE existed.
  • Developed an Internet polling system for gathering marketing data online.
  • Represented Adaptivity to present and showcase its product at industry conferences.
Oracle Corporation Redwood Shores, CA, USA
Oracle was the world's largest enterprise software company. It provided relational database servers and applications for enterprises to manage their data.
Senior Member of Technical Staff 2/1995 to 6/1997
  • Designed and implemented the Oracle Mobile Agent for email, which provided wireless access to the Oracle InterOffice email server.
  • Improved the SMTP mail gateway to make it translate and decode MIME email to Oracle InterOffice mail and vice versa.
  • Worked with Oracle data center to maintain InterOffice email servers and gateways.
Oracle Corporation Redwood Shores, CA, USA
Member of Technical Staff 8/1993 to 2/1995
  • Ported base code of Oracle products including the RDBMS, database tools to various Unix platforms.
  • Performed quality assurance tasks.
Education
Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA 1/1994 to 12/1995
Master of Science, Computer Science
Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA 8/1990 to 5/1993
Bachelor of Science, Computer Science and Chemical Engineering
Skills
Familiar and experienced with agile Scrum, BDD, TDD methodologies. Proficient in Python, JavaScript, Golang, Ruby, Java. Familiar with Linux, iOS and Android development environments. Excellent knowledge and plenty of hands-on experience with Ruby on Rails, Nodejs, React, orchestration tools of Kubernetes. Familiar with GCP, AWS, serverless.
Languages
Native fluency in English and Cantonese. Putonghua (Mandarin Chinese). Japanese (JLPT Level 3).