John Wu

About

Ten years in, I've built systems in a lot of different contexts — government, IoT, healthcare, SaaS. The work that sticks with me most isn't the biggest in scale. It's WiSide, a crowd intelligence platform I wrote alone from scratch. By 2021 it was running on 314 scanners across Taiwan. I've been recruited multiple times by people I'd worked with before — I take that as a decent signal that I'm someone people want to keep working with.

Technical Skills

Experience

1. R&D Team Lead

   Cedars Digital May 2024 – Present
   • Led an R&D team through the company's v2.0 platform rewrite; peaked at 12 engineers (FE, BE, Singapore remote) across multiple reorgs, recruited 3 frontend engineers in 2024 — each reorg meant rebuilding rhythms from scratch, the team kept shipping.
   • Owned the supply chain product line — milestone planning with the PO, sitemap and flowcharts, OpenAPI v3.0 specs, integration coordination with two other product lines. Introduced Specification-Driven Development (SDD) with the software development manager — engineers wrote their own specs, then used Claude Code to generate dev docs, tasks, and implementation; velocity rose enough that the bottleneck shifted upstream to spec-writing.
   • Built an AI code review system into GitLab CI/CD — each repo sets `SERVICE_NAME` in pipeline config; a profile-loader maps it via `registry.yaml` to the right system profile, then composes shared + system-specific review standards into a prompt. No TypeScript changes needed to onboard a new service — just yaml. Calls Gemini API (provider-switchable via env config) with a self-reflection pass; deployed across 32 microservices repos. Internal survey showed the majority of engineers read every AI comment and changed code before merging.
   • Built an RD Guide Book on Google Docs — v1.0 / v2.0 product info, system architecture, environment setup, internal tech shares, all in one place. Started as a way to stop answering the same onboarding questions; new engineers actually rely on it now.

2. Sr. R&D Engineer

   Cedars Digital Aug 2023 – Sep 2024
   • Joined as one of the founding backend engineers — referred by a former colleague — to build the carbon footprint and emissions management SaaS platform from scratch (Node.js, Nest.js, PostgreSQL, Redis, GCP). v1.0 shipped and reached multiple enterprise clients.
   • About nine months in I was promoted to Team Lead; the work shifted from writing code to managing the people writing it.

3. Sr. R&D Engineer

   Taiwan Data Science Co. Aug 2018 – Mar 2022
   • Recruited by my manager at Alliance Digital Technology to help start the engineering team — one of the first engineers in the door.
   • Built WiSide's application layer (Laravel + Vue.js management backend) and output layer (real-time crowd dashboard + event reports) solo; edge scanners and the ELK pipeline were team work. Working at the boundary between layers — without control over either side — forced a discipline I've kept since — define the interface contracts first, and let both sides evolve against the contract. Scanner protocol and ELK query schema were versioned independently; when the ELK team upgraded the server, the changes were absorbed at the interface layer without touching application logic. By 2021 — 314 scanners across Taiwan; 20 scanners detected 55,431 attendees at a 2019 political rally, 15 scanners counted 113,576 people at Taipei's 2020 New Year's Eve. Featured at 22+ exhibitions.
   • Constituency management system for a New Taipei City legislator — 39,664 constituent records, 137 field visit logs (Nov 2019 – Jul 2021), Excel import/export, iOS app backend.
   • Douzo! — full-stack e-commerce platform, joint initiative with Chunghwa Telecom and local governments in Yunlin, Chiayi, and Tainan, connecting farmer-producers directly with consumers (no intermediaries), plus a separate merchant dashboard.
   • MND access-control system — integrated hardware from 4 vendors across multiple bases nationwide.
   • Beigang Hospital questionnaire system — separate database layer, redesigned questionnaire UI.

4. R&D Engineer

   Alliance Digital Technology Sep 2017 – Aug 2018
   • Referred by my manager at iPanSec. Built ADTC-IFI, a full-stack vending machine sales visualization platform — pulled sales data from an ELK backend, presented it on a dashboard (Laravel + jQuery + GCP). Also wrote a PHP sample API for Mobile Connect and integrated a partner manufacturer's product into the company platform, demonstrated at a press conference launch.
   • Left when my direct manager moved on to start Taiwan Data Science Co. and brought me along.

5. R&D Engineer / Software Engineer

   iPanSec · TanoSecure · Gapertise Mar 2015 – Aug 2017
   • A pattern I've returned to throughout my career — building systems that orchestrate external tools and reformat their output into business-usable results.
   • Worked across three entities under the same technical founder; the core team stayed together as he became CTO at the latter two.
   • Built A4P, a full-stack APK security analysis platform — Python subprocess calls a local MobSF instance to analyze Android APK files, then a web crawler scrapes the generated report pages and reformats the data into structured security reports. A decade later at Cedars I reused the same architecture for AI code review, swapping MobSF for Gemini API. The pattern scales.
   • Delivered the MJIB IP blacklist management system — integrated with hardware network management equipment, visualized data from an ELK backend; played a key role in the company's security lab certification.
   • Led a team of 6 engineers (FE + BE) to build an IoT device marketplace — integrated a partner library into a customized Node-RED build so the platform could control LEDs, ultrasonic sensors, and buzzers directly.

6. Software Engineer

   Weshine Technology Dec 2012 – May 2015
   • First job out of university. Joined a cross-vendor team of 20+ engineers (in-house + contractor) on MVDIS III, a government motor vehicle information system (ASP.NET / C# / MSSQL / Informix) — did a bit of everything — feature development, design docs, device testing, QA, QC, customer service, plus side website requests from clients.
   • Where I learned what it actually means to ship software at scale with a team — and that QA is not optional.

Featured Work

Side Projects

Education & Certifications

B.S. Management Information Systems, Huafan University (2008–2012) — Information Security Program

• PKI Innovation Competition — 1st Place (2010)
• PKI Innovation Competition — 2nd Place (2012)

Certifications

• AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner (2023–2028)
• TOEIC 740 / TutorABC Lv.12
• ISO 20000-1:2011
• ISO 27001:2005