Ho-Ki Au (欧可祺)
E-mail: hoki.au@gmail.com
Profile
Seasoned software professional with 19 years of proven success in the software industry, managing engineering projects, teams and delivering quality products.
My strengths include:
  • Versatility by having experience in almost all functional areas in software engineering.
  • Having an inquisitive and open mind that likes to learn and leverage new technologies and engineering practices.
  • Persistence, with a "will do whatever it takes" attitude in solving problems.
  • Lead by example.
  • Creative thinking in solving technical and customers' problems.
  • Efficient use of resources to achieve engineering goals.
  • Excellent communication skills in English and Chinese.
Experience
Shanghai Zhiyong Information Technology Co. Ltd. (Scientific Learning China) Shanghai, PRC
A subsidiary in China of the US public company Scientific Learning Corp, Zhiyong developed the Reading Assistant product which helped kids practice reading English. Zhiyong hosted on-line educational software for Scientific Learning's users in China.
Head of China Development 4/2010 to date
  • Solely responsible for establishing a WFOE subsidiary for Scientific Learning Corp in Shanghai.
  • Managed the entire budget for the subsidiary company in China.
  • Built up the software engineering team by careful recruiting of local talent to take on development and QA work for the Reading Assistant product.
  • Led the team to develop a rich internet application featuring a speech recognizer browser plug-in which helped kids practice reading English. The web application was developed with JavascriptMVC and jQuery. All reading content was accessible via RESTful API provided by the server designed on Ruby-on-Rails.
  • Implemented the Scrum development process with the engineering team, which had daily communication with product managers and its engineering counterpart in the US.
  • Successfully released the first version of web-based Reading Assistant product in less than two years. The product was used by users worldwide by any web browser on Windows and Mac.
  • Set up and maintained servers in China to provide Scientific Learning's on-line learning applications to users in China.
  • Built and maintained IT infrastructure for the office and the hosted servers.
  • Worked closely with value-added resellers across the Asia-Pacific region on product issues, and maintained their satisfaction.
Saybot Inc. Shanghai, PRC
Saybot provided software technologies to help users learn and practice spoken English. Founded in 2004, Saybot aimed to serve the English Language Learner market in China. 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.
  • Participated in company's fund-raising campaigns. Successfully raised more than USD 8 million series-B funding in 2007
  • Built and managed the software engineering and IT teams.
  • Oversaw and managed all research and software development activities.
  • Directed the Engineering team to design and build Saybot's software products which featured state-of-the-art speech recognition technologies, and an on-line store of English learning materials.
  • Successfully built the first version of Saybot's flagship English learning software in less than two years, which was followed by a major release every six months.
  • Designed the architecture of a web-based distributed recognition system to assess speakers' levels of spoken English.
  • 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 speech recognition server which exposed an fcgi interface and pluggable into most web servers, thereby leveraging their load-balancing and scalability features.
  • Directed the development of company's web site and on-line store which were originally built on J2EE and later re-architected to be made up of RESTful services built on Ruby-on-Rails.
  • Worked with Chinese telecom companies and CDN providers to optimize deployment strategy.
  • Led engineering team to develop internal web-based tools to improve efficiency and accuracy of learning content production.
  • Managed IT team to serve the company with more than 70 people.
  • Worked closely with other 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 application model objects, logic and workflow could be easily extended and customized.
  • Designed the collaborative workflow engine, authentication and authorization mechanism to be used by NorthStar's financial applications.
  • 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.
  • Worked with customers in Japan and Taiwan to design product features.
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 on-line.
  • 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 2/1994 to 2/1995
  • Ported base code of Oracle products including the RDBMS, database tools to various Unix platforms.
  • Performed quality assurance tasks.
  • Fixed bugs in various Oracle products.
  • Reviewed port-specific documentations.
  • Performed system administration on the team's network of computers.
Oracle Corporation Redwood Shores, CA, USA
Associate Technical Analyst 8/1993 to 2/1994
  • Provided technical support for various Oracle products running on VMS.
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
Honors
Recipient of the Hoechst-Celanese Award for Excellence in 1993. Recipient of the Sir Run Run Shaw Scholarship for outstanding computer science students in 1990. Recipient of the Joyce Kuok Foundation Scholarship in 1990.
Skills
Familiar with object-oriented and procedural programming paradigms. Proficient in Ruby, Coffeescript, Javascript, C++, Java. Familiar with Ruby-on-Rails. Good knowledge of jQuery, SASS.
Languages
Native fluency in English and Cantonese. Mandarin. Japanese (JLPT Level 3).