Gary Wong
From training robots to nail the perfect brew to building distributed systems that move money across the globe—I build software where reliability matters.
I'm a software engineer drawn to problems where the physical and digital worlds collide, and where reliability really matters.
I spent six years at Cafe X helping turn an early-stage concept into the world's first robotic coffee bar, scaling the platform from a single prototype to automated shops that served well over 130,000 customers. These days at Visa, I work on distributed systems that move money around the globe, having also spent time building developer platforms and cloud infrastructure along the way. Whether it's a barista robot or a payments network, I care about the same things: clean systems, good tooling, and shipping things that actually work. I'm a certified cloud architect on both AWS and Google Cloud, so I'm equally at home wherever the infrastructure lives.
Staff Software Engineer ACTIVE
- Building and operating distributed systems that move money across the globe.
Senior Platform Engineer
- Provided technical guidance to engineering teams on adopting Google Cloud products.
- Simplified the Infrastructure-as-Code process with new tooling and best practices.
- Integrated OpenTelemetry into serverless systems for better observability.
- Identified recurring engineering pain points and designed solutions to improve efficiency.
Founding Engineer → Lead Software Engineer
- As Founding Engineer (2015–2016): turned the founders' idea into a working prototype in six months, built backend services and APIs from scratch, and operated the demo machines at LAUNCH Festival 2016, where Cafe X took home the winning prize.
- Led a revamp of core systems—introducing microservices, CI/CD, and Kubernetes—enabling the team to ship features rapidly.
- Designed a data pipeline into a BI platform, giving operators, founders and investors real-time insights and metrics.
- Expanded the product and infrastructure to the US to launch the world's first automated coffee shop. By January 2021, Cafe X had served over 130,000 customers and produced 250,000+ drinks.
- Managed platform infrastructure across GCP and AWS, keeping production highly available for daily robotic-shop operations.
Software Developer
- Built indoor navigation apps for shopping malls, helping visitors find the shortest path to any destination.
- Developed an RFID-based attendance tracking system for the Business of IP Asia Forum 2015.
- Designed an IoT-based packaging system for garment manufacturing that cut human error by 70%.
- Introduced OpenStack for resource provisioning and migrated the team from Subversion to a Git/GitLab workflow.
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ShellA lightweight Go CLI that lets a coding agent view and edit Confluence pages straight from the terminal.
GoThrowaway projects, half-baked ideas, and weekend experiments—the place where things get tinkered with.
GoLet's build something
Whether it's robots, payments, developer tooling, or something nobody's tried yet. I'm always happy to talk shop.