Choo Foo Lai

Engineering Manager

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.