About Me
Hi, my name is Foo Lai and I am an Engineering Manager with over 4 years of project management experience. I am currently working for ST Engineering as Deputy District Manager, Kaohsiung.
I enjoy working with cross-functional teams across both business and software development functions and refining architectural vision and technical strategy. My strengths lie in communicating and breaking down engineering concepts to a non-technical audience and coordinating interfaces across multiple engineering systems. I have worked with a range of different languages and frameworks and I am always looking for opportunities to learn something new. The things that I currently have the most experience working with are: Java, C#, SQL/NoSQL and DevOps tools (Jenkins, Gitlab/SVN, Jira/Confluence, SonarQube).
Experience
Deputy District Manager, Kaohsiung
ST Engineering (Taiwan)
Dec 2021 - Present
- Collaborate with project managers to develop engineering project plans and influence the overall direction of key E&M systems development for Kaohsiung MRT network.
- Grew the engineering team from 10 to 45 staff within 1 year to support 3 concurrent MRT projects valued at ~NTD$69.7bn.
- Foster a conducive environment for staff to thrive and provide coaching to team members on technical contributions, system architecture and stakeholder management.
- Lead an offshore system engineering team to architect and deliver large scale SCADA system for Kaohsiung Red Line Extension.
Assistant Principal Engineer
ST Engineering Electronics Ltd.
Jul 2019 - Nov 2021
- Developed a fast and reliable CI/CD pipeline within 6 months to deliver standardised high-quality releases and reduce deployment time by 90%.
- Onboarded 4 cross-functional teams onto a set of consistent agile development methods and tooling to enhance portability of team members and cross-team collaboration.
- Established technical direction for multiple refactoring initiatives to reduce technical debts and improve product performance and usability.
Senior Software Engineer
ST Engineering Electronics Ltd.
Sep 2016 - Jul 2019
- Developed reliable and fault-tolerant ETL pipelines to handle both batch and stream processing from multiple data feeds for a new real-time MRT network monitoring platform.
- Built BI reports with real-time financial and operational data and enabled key stakeholders with self-service capabilities to react faster to business needs.
- Created high-fidelity prototypes to drive the conceptualisation of a new product and conducted successful demonstrations to Ministers and Delegates in an international transport exhibition.
Education & Certifications
Project Management Institute
Project Management Professional (PMP)
Oct 2020 - Present
Planned and organised the overall schedule and budget to ensure timely delivery of the Kaohsiung Rapid Transit Red Line Gangshan Luzhu Extension Line E&M project worth NTD$9.6bn.
Columbia University
M.S. in Management Science and Engineering
2015 - 2016
Developed the data imputation model that mined public and proprietary datasets for a dynamic risk assessment model, leading to a successful adoption by Standard & Poor’s Global Market Intelligence in their solution to assess countries’ creditworthiness.
Carnegie Mellon University
B.S. in Electrical and Computer Engineering
2012 - 2015
- GPA: 3.97 / 4.0
- Built a comprehensive API for access to a robotic window cleaner’s sensor and control systems and secured the best mechatronics design award.
Skills
- Languages: Fluent in Java, Groovy, Scala, Python, C#, TSQL, Bash/Shell, CMD/Powershell; Familiar with HTML, CSS, JavaScript.
- Platforms/Tools: Apache Hadoop, IBM WebSphere, Jenkins, GitLab/SVN, SonarQube, Jira/Confluence.
- Databases: Microsoft SQL Server, Hive, HBase, HDFS.
- BI Tools: QlikSense, Tableau.