SENIOR ENGINEERING MANAGER @ VISA / LONDON, UK

Gary Wong

Software that works.
In the real world.

I build systems and lead engineering teams. My work has taken me from robotic coffee shops to treasury systems at Visa, with plenty of cloud infrastructure and developer tooling along the way.

AREAS OF WORKRoboticsDistributed systemsAI infrastructureDeveloper tools

01 / Selected work

~/work
ROBOTICS & PRODUCTION SYSTEMSCafe X · 2015 to 2021

From prototype to robotic coffee shops

Six years building and operating the software behind Cafe X.

As a founding engineer, I built the backend services and APIs that helped bring a prototype to life in six months. As the company grew, I led a redesign of the core systems and managed production infrastructure across AWS and Google Cloud.

6 monthsIdea to working prototype
130k+Customers served by Cafe X*
250k+Drinks produced by Cafe X*
*Company totals as of January 2021My role at Cafe X ↓
DEVELOPER TOOLS

confluence-cli

A lightweight Go CLI that lets a coding agent view and edit Confluence pages directly from the terminal.

MODELLING & WEB TOOLS

UK Tax Calculator

Estimate your take-home pay and see how tax bands, National Insurance, salary sacrifice, RSUs, and the Personal Allowance taper affect it.

2025/26 tax yearOpen tax calculator ↗

02 / Experience

~/experience
2022 to presentLondon · Remote

Visa CURRENT

Staff Software Engineer → Senior Engineering Manager

I joined Visa as a Staff Software Engineer, building and operating distributed systems that move money around the globe. The work brought my experience with production systems into global payments, where reliability remained central to the job.

Today, I’m a Senior Engineering Manager leading five engineers building the next generation of treasury systems. We focus on observability of corporate balances and cash flows, forecasting, and intercompany exposure. I bring my experience building and operating systems to how I lead the team.

2021 to 2022London

Freetrade

Senior Platform Engineer

At Freetrade, I focused on making life easier for the engineers building the product. I worked with teams to find recurring problems in their daily work, guided their adoption of Google Cloud, and simplified Infrastructure as Code with better tooling and shared practices.

I also integrated OpenTelemetry into serverless systems so engineers could better understand how their services behaved. Much of the role was about making infrastructure easier to use and software easier to operate.

2015 to 2021San Francisco / Hong Kong

Cafe X Technologies

Founding Engineer → Lead Software Engineer

I joined Cafe X when the robotic coffee bar was still an idea. As a founding engineer, I built the backend services and APIs from scratch and helped turn that idea into a working prototype in six months. I then operated the demo machines at LAUNCH Festival 2016, where Cafe X won the competition.

As Cafe X grew, my focus moved from the prototype to the systems needed to run coffee shops every day. I helped bring the product and infrastructure to the US, redesigned core systems using microservices, CI/CD, and Kubernetes, and managed production across AWS and Google Cloud. I also built a data pipeline so operators, founders, and investors could see how the business was performing.

By January 2021, Cafe X had served more than 130,000 customers and produced over 250,000 drinks. Over six years, I grew from a founding engineer building the first backend services into the lead software engineer supporting daily shop operations.

2012 to 2015Hong Kong

QBS System Limited

Software Developer

At QBS, I built software for people navigating shopping malls, attending events, and working in garment manufacturing. The projects included indoor navigation apps, RFID attendance tracking for the Business of IP Asia Forum 2015, and an IoT packaging system that reduced human error by 70%.

I also started taking on the infrastructure and tools we used as a team. I introduced OpenStack for resource provisioning and moved us from Subversion to Git and GitLab. It was an early step into improving how software gets built and run, alongside building the applications themselves.

03 / About

~/about

I’m drawn to problems where the physical and digital worlds meet.

I enjoy understanding how a system fits together, making it reliable, and giving people better tools to work with. That has been a constant across robotics, payments, and cloud platforms.

Outside work, I experiment with AI hardware and coding agents, and build small tools for problems I run into.

BASED IN
London, UK
EDUCATION
The Hong Kong Polytechnic University
CERTIFICATIONS
Cloud Architect
AWS & Google Cloud
~/contact

Always happy to talk shop.

Get in touch to talk about systems, engineering leadership, or something you’re building.