Hey, I'm Tan.
Engineering Leader · Builder · AI Enthusiast
I'm an engineering leader who likes being close to the work.
Before Upwork, I built enterprise systems at IBM and PwC — working with Walmart, American Airlines, CIGNA, HSBC, and CIBC. I hold 2 US patents in customer analytics.
I spent 11 years at Upwork — started as the first engineer on monetization, grew to lead 45+ engineers, then recently moved back to hands-on architecture work. Why? AI is reshaping everything, and I wanted to be building in it, not just managing around it.
What I've Built
Ads Platform
$0 → $100MBuilt and scaled ads business in 3 years at Upwork
Pricing Infrastructure
CoreCentralized fee calculation across all marketplace products
Team Building
3 → 45+Scaled monetization teams across Ads, Subscriptions, Pricing
Subscriptions
76% YoYGrowth to 100K+ active subscribers
Virtual Currency
ConnectsToken ledger, ASC 606 accounting, prepaid & drawdown models
Promotions Platform
CurrentCredit system and pricing orchestration for monetization
Enterprise Systems
2 PatentsFortune 500 consulting at IBM/PwC: Walmart, American Airlines, CIGNA, HSBC, CIBC
Personal Projects
A message bus where AI agents on one machine talk to each other: named mailboxes, queues that hold messages until read, shared topics, and presence detection that notices when an agent dies silently
Trading research system that finds emerging market themes in the news with LLMs, maps each theme to the companies it helps or hurts, tests whether those companies' revenue and prices bear the theme out, and scores its signals on sealed data it has never seen
AI chatbot with Gilfoyle's personality — fine-tuned Qwen 2.5 7B on GCP