Wai Lau

Financial Platform

• Built and maintained a high-throughput, low-latency financial ledger with Aeron, serving international and institutional clients.
• Used an LLM-assisted, multi-repo workflow (Cursor with Sourcegraph and Buf MCP servers) to ship changes to financial systems safely and quickly.
• Drove a Cadence-to-Temporal migration, leveraging Buf to match gRPC APIs across services.
• Built multi-currency, multi-platform financial flows managing risk, slippage, and compensation steps.

Build & Deploy

• Reduced AWS costs by $500K/year by graphing ECR image dependencies and safely pruning unused storage.
• Owned and improved the company-wide CI/CD pipeline; unified two distinct build-and-deploy architectures into one system.
• Designed and integrated a gRPC schema (proto) registry into the deployment pipeline.

Search Platform

• Built active-active multi-region failover for search across all of Shopify, holding ~150TB of indexed data and serving ~2K QPS on a normal day, 30K when Black Friday hit.
• Led a cross-functional effort to bring Search to the edge, cutting p99 latency from 400ms to 50ms for Australia and Europe.
• Parallelized and sharded the search test suite, halving total test runtime; built queuing infrastructure for high-volume indexing and bursty backfills.

Developer Infrastructure

• Expanded and maintained company-wide developer tooling.
• Built infrastructure for testing macOS and iOS software (Anka, Docker, nested VMs).

• Built internal tooling and automation across speech recognition and NLP teams, from cluster-management interfaces to CI/CD pipelines.