Summary
Senior engineering, data science, and venture executive of 20 years and 7 countries. Built several successfully-exited and acquired technology companies. Have deployed mission-critical, scalable, production engineering and AI/ML capabilities in complex verticals: fintech/banking, travel, delivery, insurance, online gaming, marketing, SaaS, campaigning, and eCommerce.
Career Highlights
- Global VP Data for world’s largest on-demand delivery network
- Turnaround of SE Asian venture builder into $10M/a powerhouse sold to Dell/Pivotal
- Built several successfully-exited startups in SE Asia
- VP Data for $5B SE Asian travel unicorn
- Global IT Director for world’s largest human rights organization
- Directeur Technique of France’s 5th largest private M&A bank
Work Experience
Vice President, Data
Delivery Hero | Berlin/Singapore | Oct 2020 - present
Leading global data for the world’s largest on-demand delivery network. I lead global Data Platforms, Machine Products, and Analytics Products covering multi-domain and cross-entity concerns across 49 countries on 4 continents, 800k+ restaurant partners, ~25k staff, and 5M+ daily orders. 47B frontend events streamed monthly and 40 PB on global data mesh.
Vice President, Data
Traveloka | Singapore | Oct 2017 - Apr 2020
1 of 3 Group co-CTOs after technical co-founder departure. Led AI, Data Science, Analytics, and Data Engineering with 125+ team for one of Asia’s fastest growing travel unicorns: 10M+ monthly customers, 5 Business Units, 8 countries, $5B USD valuation.
- Spearheaded building and adoption of multi million dollar portfolio of AI data products driving revenues, ROI, and cost efficiencies in Sales, Marketing, Operations, and Financial Services
- Hired leadership bench of highly skilled specialists in tight Asian talent market and grew team from 57 to 125+ people
- Minted Fraud and Abuse group reducing fraud in credit product from double digits to 1% in 3 months, adding $16M USD back to company bottom line
- Built out Experimentation platform and group, powering product management best practices with faster feature development and evidence-backed decision making
- Architected new data engineering and provisioning platform, allowing efficient, rapid creation and deployment of pipelines and scalable, highly-performant machine learning APIs.
- Rebuilt 3 petabyte data warehouse on Google Big Query refocusing BUs on an actionable enterprise metrics framework (“Common View”) to guide and shape business performance
- As Group DPO, developed data governance and security standards across corporate and 5 BUs including GDPR and PDPA data protection compliance and implementation roadmap
Managing Director
Pivotal Labs APAC (formerly Neo Innovation) | Singapore | Sep 2013 - Sep 2017
Neo was Pivotal Labs’ APAC venture builder practice. Spun off in EMC’s 2012 acquisition, Neo was re-acquired 4 years later by Dell/Pivotal in Feb 2016 after becoming one of Asia’s most recognized and successful innovation studios. Full P&L, operational, strategy, and BD responsibility.
- Led turnaround of underperforming practice from 4 people into lauded SE Asian studio in under 2 years: 25+ billable staff, $10M+ USD in ARR, industry leading margins and utilization rates
- Built and launched notable, successfully-exited and acquired regional startups including PIE (Google), Luxola (LVMH), and Viki (Rakutan)
- Scaled high volume, distributed transactional systems including $2B/day settlement system for Tier 1 bank, Houseparty video app backend, business tax filing system for a major SE Asian government, and Workpass system for Singapore’s Ministry of Manpower
- MVPed and scaled new enterprise businesses, including building DataSpark, Singtel’s big data analytics platform and business, and Samsung SE Asia’s Data Science and Analytics capability and app additions to its mobile ecosystem (Galaxy etc)
CTO and Managing Director
Wakatara | Hong Kong/Sydney | Apr 2011-Sep 2013
Wakatara Heavy Industries is an NGO sector-specific engineering and data science consultancy providing production builds and product management expertise to some of the world’s most prominent NGOs.
- Advised, designed, built, and deployed major software systems for the Institute for Sustainable Futures, WWF, Amnesty International, Greenpeace, Taronga Zoo, AYCC, World Vision International, LeadNow.ca, and the International Council for Criminal Justice
- Focused on NFP-specific ERP, CRM, CMS, fundraising, campaigning, and implementations to drive operational cost-efficiencies and drive fundraising revenues or campaigning through backend and frontend product builds and enterprise integrations
Director of Online Campaigning and IT
GetUp | Sydney | Oct 2009 - Apr 2011
GetUp is Australia’s independent, online organization advocating for progressive national political change in the areas of the environment, economy, human rights, and democracy.
- Delivered multiple, winning, $1M+ USD advocacy campaigns that drove national legislative and social change in Australia
- Doubled membership to 1M+, action and donation repeat rates grew 15%, while seeing 38% reductions in abandonment rates
- Re-architected core technical platform to allow rapid-response campaigning and social media engagement to drive increased action-, donate-, and campaign win-rates
- Established campaigning culture of data-driven decision-making through metrics, experiments, and analyses to maximize campaigns’ effectiveness, propagation, donations, and action rates
Director of Information Technology
Amnesty International - International Secretariat | London | Oct 2006 - Oct 2009
Amnesty International is the world’s largest and most recognized human rights NGO. Awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1977 for its work. AI has 7M+ members worldwide supported by 70+ offices and 5000+ staff.
- Led global technology for organization overseeing Development, Corp IT, global NOPS, and Field and Secretariat Support for staff worldwide and 7 global National Regional Offices
- Transformed global development introducing new product and engineering methodologies, de-risking software development with project success rates rocketing to 90%+
- Pioneered new digital rapid response campaigning approaches vastly increasing campaign and lobbying win rates on global advocacy issues and priority campaigns
- Delivered award-winning technical and product re-architecture of the amnesty.org flagship plus global rollouts of ERP, docstore, HRIS, DAMS, and enterprise search capabilities
Director of Analytics and BI
Lancashire Finance | Vancouver | Jan 2003 - Oct 2006
Lancashire Finance is a $500M USD/a entertainment conglomerate focused primarily on online gaming with diverse interests in music, television production, and restaurants.
- Founded and grew data science team from 0 to 12 staff in 6 months to give CEO/CFO/CMO level strategic analytics, build data products and ML model insights
- Opportunities and cost savings highlighted through analyses and data product operations directly contributed $36.M USD added to company bottom line by team’s second year
- Architected and built global datawarehouse and pipelines, data engineering and science stack, and self-service analytics capabilities for global company (DB/2, R, Business Objects)
- Delivered data products portfolio included affiliate management systems, marketing ROI optimization, automated customer segmentation, churn and retention rate predictive modelling, win-back targeting, CAC/CRC and lifetime value (LTV) models
Directeur Technique (CTO)
MDIB | Paris | Apr 1999 - Dec 2002
MDIB is France’s 5th largest private investment bank specializing in M&A in media, luxury, and premium consumer brands and venture capital incubation in select digital verticals.
- Led technology for bank and its VC incubator; helmed engineering in flagship investments and acted as interim CTO on several startups including successful exits of directpanel.fr (Ipsos-Reid) and F1Live (ESPN)
- Built advanced algorithmic matching and tracking system that increased M&A throughput ~60% and directly increased bank revenues ~30% year on year from launch
- Led complete modernization and digital transformation of bank’s core software engineering, infrastructure, security, and Corp IT capabilities
Senior Information Manager, Kraft Canada | Toronto | 1995
Senior Knowledge Analyst, Cott Corporation | Toronto | 1994
Economist, Ministry of Treasury and Economics | Toronto | 1993
Technologies
Languages | Frameworks |
---|---|
GoLang DSci/ML |
Fiber, Gonic golearn, gonum, goml, gorgonia, goro, gold |
Python DSci/ML |
Flask, some Django numpy/pandas, scikit-lrn, matplotlib/seaborn/bokeh, tensorflow etc |
JS/Typescript | Node, React, Serverless.js, D3, some React Native |
Ruby | Rails, Sinatra, Padrino |
Rust, Crystal | limited production and applications experience |
Technology Stacks
- Google GCP and Amazon AWS ecosystems, architecture, and experience
- Docker, Kubernetes, CI/CD, MLfLow, some Kubeflow
- Most major GCP, AWS, and OSS datastores (BQ, BT, Redis, DynamoDB, Druid, Postgres, MySQL, Mongo), message buses/queues (Cloud Pub-Sub, Kafka, RabbitMQ), and Distributed Processing Engines (Spark, BQ, Athena, Redshift Spectrum, Presto)
- Data engineering: pipelines and ingestion (GCP Dataflow, Kinesis, Glue), ETL, datawarehousing, ML serving, and feature stores, SQL
- REST, CQRS, GraphQL, serverless (AWS lambda, some GCF), and microservices, architecture and implementation experience
Volunteer Experience
Amphibian Ark International | Australia/USA | 2013-2019
Architected and built global species assurance tracking system to coordinate zoo and conservation organization species’ survival programs and reintroduce endangered species.
DataKind | Singapore | 2014-2016
Co-founder of 1 of the 5 global hubs for DataKind, the data-science-for-good NGO, in Singapore. Director of Operations for DK SG until stepping down in late 2016.
Education
MSc Information Technology, University of Liverpool, 2003
BA Honours Economics and Political Science, Western University, 1992
Languages
English native, French advanced, Spanish proficient, Indonesian intermediate