My Career Story
Tags: career, story, technology, job
Published: 2022-07-31 14:44:56

I have been interested in tech since university when I took an elective Java programming class. I loved it, and I knew I wanted to make it my career. After graduating from college with a bachelor's degree in Chemistry, I worked as a marketing manager in the tourism industry. I met with a lot of marketers who got the business skills, but not technical skills to understand SEO and build websites, so I changed my career to become a software engineer in an Australian consultant firm and gained advanced front-end development skills. After work, I took a part-time degree in computer science, which I found to be incredibly rewarding.

One challenge I faced in the software consulting role at Accenture was working with a tight timeline. I was in charge of a large customer-based mobile app for an airline with a lot of feature requirements, so I adopt the agile approach and deliver values constantly. I would need to negotiate with the product owner sometimes in case of blockers in the project sprint. I was able to meet the business requirement, launch the mobile app to the market and earn customer satisfaction. One important lesson I learned is that technology alone cannot solve all business challenges, instead, the intersection of business and technology is where I am interested, so I took a part-time master's degree in business administration to better equip myself.

When I worked as a consultant at EY for the bank, there was a mistake made when choosing the cloud platform. We were developing the banking wallet product using Amazon Web Service, and it has the most robust features among all the cloud providers, we assumed everything was fine. When it was nearly going live and reviewed by the regulators, then we realised the AWS data centre in Hong Kong was delayed and since the bank customer data needs to be stored in the local region, we realised we need to find an alternative, and migrate the developed software to use Microsoft Azure instead, since they could fit in the regulatory requirement. Therefore, I advise and execute the new technical architecture and strategies for compliance.

As a consultant at Dynatrace, I worked as part of the post-sales team for the software monitoring product. One time, I had a new client at Huawei who wanted to integrate our product into their cloud platform. I worked onsite at the Shenzhen office in a client-facing role. The work culture there was notorious demanding, with a 996 work schedule, which is 9 am to 9 pm, 6 days a week. I was bombarded with client questions ahead of the statement of work (SoW) signed. The client appreciated I was helpful and our collaboration helped the project launch and result in a big profile for my company. I work vigorously to earn and keep customer trust.

In my role at HSBC as technical lead, I showed leadership when delivering a merchant online payment solution for Malaysia. My team was developing a new website to replace the legacy system. I realised we were all working separately, some of us working in backend servers, some of us working in the frontend user interface, but none of us working on the end-to-end user experience. To make things worse, there were office politics inhibiting the delivery of values and success in the market. I suggested we speak with the customers and understand their pain points and also collect Splunk log data on error messages. I navigate the office politic by being the owner of the result, thinking long term, showing sincerity to help and earnestness to deliver values. I delegated responsibilities to each team member, and we improved the banking customers’ experience with a higher transaction success rate. Data shows the improvement from 40% to 70% success transactions.

I am someone who does whatever it takes to accomplish a task. In my current role as a client engineering manager at Thought Machine, I had a colleague in pre-sales, who suddenly got a presentation to do with one of the biggest banks in Taiwan with their senior management. The presentation was only a week away, and my colleague in charge could not speak Mandarin Chinese. I stepped in to translate the presentation slides along with my own. I had to work late for a few days, but I completed everything, even though it was not easy to translate the technical terms into my first language. The presentation went well, I presented all the slides in fluent mandarin Chinese, and the prospect was impressed.

I communicated with others daily in my current role. Recently, I was in charge of training members, new clients and partners in Vietnam. I planned each training session with clear objectives, and I practised my delivery. Sometimes it was difficult for the audience, since English is our second language, and I have to slow down and repeat my points using different phrases. I also answered all questions, both from technical members and non-technical stakeholders. By speaking clearly and communicating any assumptions made, I helped the new members get up to speed and deliver software for the project.

Outside of work, I love to read books and study. I started studying for cloud certifications about five years ago. Last year, I decided I want to get certified, so I created a study schedule three times a week. Now I am certified in Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Microsoft Azure, Kubernetes (CKA, CKAD, CKS, KCNA) and also Scrum (PSM, PSPO) for project management. Besides, I enjoyed improving communication and public speaking by joining Toastmasters clubs. I am never done learning and always seek to improve myself. I am curious about new possibilities and act to explore them.

Overall, I am a builder of software, love to try new things and imagine big dreams. I love to collaborate with customers, partners and other teams to craft architectures, proof of concepts and demonstrations of my work back from customers' business needs and accelerate the adoption of appropriate technology. I can shape and design solutions covering a spread of tech concerns like security, tenant isolation in compute and storage, hybrid networking, CI/CD to reduce time to market, rightsizing and auto-scaling of infrastructure, and purpose-built databases to name a few. I have the ability to learn new technology and develop industry-relevant architectures and convey business value. Happy to connect: [https://www.linkedin.com/in/victorleungtw](https://www.linkedin.com/in/victorleungtw)