Tim Lai - Resume

Professional Summary

Data-driven Senior Engineering Leader with demonstrated success building and leading high-performance teams to deliver scalable SaaS platforms, internet-scale e-commerce sites, and AI/ML data products. Excels at collaboration across Executive Leadership, Product, Design, GTM, Technology, & Customer Support teams to deliver value to our customers and meet strategic company goals. Extensive experience creating innovative event-driven cloud-native modern software platforms. Fosters a culture of operational excellence and growth through continuous improvement of teams and processes.

Organizational process expertise in OKR, QBR, M&A, Scrum.

Certifications: AWS Solution Architect, Certified Scrum Master, OKR Coach, IBM Blockchain

Professional Experience

Payscale, Burlington, MA

Vice President of Engineering (2022 – Nov 2024)

Led Product Engineering for core SaaS platform Payfactors and platform services.
Directed engineering architecture strategy including event-driven microservices and data platform design using DW, AI/ML, LLM, and proprietary models.
Oversaw development of scalable ML and MLOps pipelines, embeddings, observability, and cross-product semantic search.
Ensured alignment between R&D Roadmap and customer value, platform scalability, interoperability, and security/compliance.
Modernized CI/CD pipelines for consistent, high-reliability deployments across engineering org.
Drove key metrics (ARR, PR throughput, defect rates) to ensure high delivery capacity.
Rolled out learning/development programs, career ladders, and internal promotions.
Maintained SOC-2 compliance with DAST, SAST, Pen testing.
Tech: React, Angular, .NET Core, NodeJS, Python, SQL Server, MongoDB, Redis, Snowflake, Kafka, Docker, Jenkins, GitHub Actions, Azure/AWS

Senior Director of Engineering (2021 – 2022)

Led M&A technical due diligence and integration for three companies.
Redefined R&D Roadmap with Product; optimized delivery predictability and resourcing.
Oversaw customer migration from on-prem to SaaS achieving 90% renewal rates.
Partnered with Marketing and Design to refresh www.payscale.com UX.
Established new offshore engineering team to stabilize legacy platforms in 6 months.

Payfactors (Merged with Payscale in 2021), Burlington, MA

Director of Engineering (2020 – 2021)

Improved distributed team communication during COVID-19 shutdowns.
Enhanced engineering rigor through code review, QA automation, CI/CD modernization, and compliance (SOC2, GDPR).

Vistaprint (Cimpress), Waltham, MA

Software Engineering Manager (2018 – 2020)

Led 6 engineering squads across merchandising and assortment teams.
Built new web/mobile platform (React, Gatsby, NodeJS, TypeScript) with CI/CD and AWS (ECS, EKS, Lambda, S3, CloudFront).
Drove Agile coaching, product roadmapping, technical architecture, and team hiring/mentoring (US and India).
Implemented SRE principles and managed vendor evaluations.

IBM, Waltham MA & Boca Raton FL

Solution Architect / Ops Lead, IBM Procurement (2013 – 2018)

Defined cloud architecture for RFx and catalog management platforms.
Managed SysOps engineers and implemented CI/CD to cut 500+ hours/year.

Team Lead / Application Architect, IBM Microelectronics (2000 – 2013)

Led design and development of integrated systems for wafer design and manufacturing execution.
Delivered multiple projects across ETL, BI, and SaaS solutions.
Tech: UNIX (AIX, Linux), C++, Java, J2EE, DB2, XML/JSON

Education

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
B.S., Computer Systems Engineering