Selangor, Malaysia · UTC+8
Charlie Tang Hoong
Forward Deployed AI & Automation Engineer
I turn ambiguous business problems into production-ready AI, automation and software systems.
Fifteen years of shipping production software across AdTech, e-commerce, logistics and enterprise automation — based in Selangor, Malaysia, and working with customers across Malaysia, Singapore and the wider APAC region, remotely or on site.
Most of my recent work starts the same way: a system somebody else built, no documentation, and a business that cannot stop while it is fixed.
15+ years
Production delivery — eight roles, four employers, two ventures
Tens of thousands req/s
AdTech backends carrying billions of monthly ad impressions
Sub-100 ms p95
On selected paths, after refactoring, query tuning and multi-layer caching
15+ pipelines
Price monitoring, lead generation and market intelligence, built for SME clients
3 of 3 costed honestly
AI feasibility engagements in three unrelated domains — two declined on capital cost, one built
Two of those three AI proposals did not go ahead, and that is the point: the customer got a real number early enough to say no cheaply.
Selected Work
View all fiveFive deliveries, each written the same way: what the customer was actually trying to do, what was unclear, what I decided, what I built with my own hands, and how it reached production.
Case 01
Building against a system we did not own
A multi-role booking and ordering platform went live against an enterprise client's legacy ERP, with the API contract negotiated directly with the client's own engineers and every scope change signed off before it reached engineering.
Case 02
Taking the typing out of a document workflow that could not go offline
A hybrid OCR and LLM pipeline substantially reduced the manual data entry in a high-volume shipping-document workflow, inside an operation whose source systems had no API and could not be replaced.
Case 04
Three AI proposals, and the two I advised against
Three AI feasibility engagements in three unrelated domains, each turned into a solution design with a costed build estimate: two were correctly declined on capital cost, and the third was built.
How I Work
The full methodThe same seven steps whether the customer is an enterprise operations team or a two-person SME. The order matters more than the tooling: most delivery failures I have seen were decided before any code was written.
01
Discover
Sit with the people doing the work today and document the current process as it really runs, not as the org chart describes it.
02
Define
Draw the proposed flow, walk the stakeholder through it, and get written confirmation before engineering starts.
03
Design
Decide what to buy and what to build before deciding how to build it. Be honest about which constraints are real.
04
Build
Take the complex, contract-defining work personally; delegate the straightforward surface.
05
Deploy
Assume the environment is not mine to change. Integrate without invading, and always leave a path for a person to take over mid-run.
06
Measure
Decide up front what “working” means and how it will be observed — and for AI systems, an evaluation set rather than an impression.
07
Iterate
Ship the phase, keep the second phase’s prerequisites visible, and let what production reveals reorder the backlog.
What I Bring
What I bring, in fullGrouped by what it does for a business. The tools are underneath each one, in that order on purpose.
Customer Discovery & Solution Framing
Turning an incomplete brief into a defined scope with a costed estimate and an agreed definition of done — working directly with the people who own the problem.
Applied AI & Workflow Automation
AI systems that have to run inside a real operation: document extraction with a human review step, support assistants with escalation to a person, and RPA across finance and logistics.
Solution Architecture & Enterprise Integration
Connecting systems that were never designed to be connected — a client’s legacy ERP, source systems with no API at all, and the manual steps in between.
Production Engineering & Reliability
Owning a system past its release. Long-running jobs that resume from where they stopped. Failures that surface while a human can still fall back to the manual process.
Technical Delivery & Stakeholder Alignment
Leading delivery and technical decisions rather than headcount: architecture and technology-selection calls, code-review practice, and mentoring through the actual blocker.
Let’s talk
Forward Deployed Engineer · Forward Deployed AI Engineer · Applied AI Engineer · Solutions Engineer · Customer Engineer · AI Solutions Architect · Technical Delivery Lead
Based in Selangor, Malaysia. Open to client-site work in the Klang Valley, including long-term placement, and to Singapore-based and regional APAC projects.