Joshua Tan

Senior Software Engineer at Google

Singapore, Singapore

About

A leader with a proven ability to drive product and technical strategy, build high-impact solutions through strong collaboration, and mentor engineers with a people-first approach.

Experience

  • Senior Software Engineer at Google
    Dec 2016 - Present · 9 yrs 8 mos

    Google Pay (GPay) As Tech Lead of GPay Japan User Experiences, GPay3 Japan Merchants, and GPay India Spot Platform. Led full-stack teams of up to 8 engineers across the Search, Maps, and Payments stacks for complex, multi-quarter projects: – Led GPay Japan’s strategic pivot from a single-surface app to a multi-surface innersourcing model, launching a new feature on Search within three months with a team new to the stack. – Drove the product and technical strategy, and execution with speed and strong collaboration skills. – Effectively resolved conflicts across teams and functions on code ownership, on-call responsibilities, and launch blockers. – Scaled numerous products across several Google properties by driving architecture decisions across teams with XFN buy-in. – Shaped career paths for junior engineers, coaching them on aligning their skills and career ambitions with the company’s success. – Build a high-performance payment method that can handle 30 TPS, p95 <1s while maintaining business continuity. – Built and scaled the Spot Platform (embedded webapps) for GPay to make it easy for merchants and users to create a commercial presence within GPay. We launched at Google for India 2019 in under a year and scaled to 200+ merchants in 6 months. – Designed a full-stack plugin and access control system, accelerating secure API development and cutting weeks off security reviews. As GPay Security Ambassador. Established a security review process for the GPay organisation of thousands of employees. Conducted reviews to ensure high security and trust for the GPay app. ArCore/Daydream Took on multiple roles (Eng, PM, UX, TPM) to launch Measure 2.0, Google’s AR-measuring app, with a team of two engineers (including myself). – Achieved >500K installs in a month, 200K MAUs 6 months post-launch.

  • Research Assistant at Parallel Data Lab, CMU
    May 2015 - Jun 2016 · 1 yr 2 mos

    Optimised network efficiency in LazyTable, a distributed ML parameter server, using Snappy compression (C++). – Achieved 15s speedup.

  • A*STAR - Agency for Science, Technology and Research (6 yrs 7 mos)
    • Research Engineer
      Jun 2008 - Dec 2014 · 6 yrs 7 mos

      Developed Tachyon (Python), a rapid protein sequence retrieval algorithm. – Achieved a 200x speedup over BLAST. Built a cross-platform (Windows/Linux), multi-language (C++/Java/Python/Lua), dis- tributed, Synchronous Reactive System robotics middleware enabling seamless component development. Created a 3D robot simulation engine in C++ (Crystal Space 3D, OpenGL, Bullet Physics), integrating it into the middleware.

    • Senior Officer (Corporate Communications/Media Relations)
      Jan 2010 - Jun 2011 · 1 yr 6 mos

      Designed the agency’s communications strategy, crafted speeches for C-suite executives, and authored press releases and organised media events publicising research breakthroughs.