Skip to content
Sample profile. This is an example profile that shows how Introworth works, not a real person. You can send a message to try the flow, but nobody reads or replies to it and you are never charged.

Jiahao Chen

Sample profile

CTO at Forge Studio · Payments infrastructure · Kafka, idempotency

Works at
Forge Studio
Location
Hong Kong · HKT (UTC+8)
Experience
13+ years experience
Education
University of Sydney
Languages
English, Cantonese
Hiring
Message Connect

Overview

21 years in software engineering, the last 3 at Forge Studio, where I lead the payments platform team. Grew the payments platform team from 4 to 19 engineers. Reduced cloud spend on payments platform by 18% in two quarters. Before that: Xero and KPMG. Most at home with Kafka and gRPC. I read too many books about cities.

Good reasons to reach out
  • Candidates for the role I'm hiring for
  • Second opinions on Kafka decisions
  • Thoughtful intros to people in my field
  • Questions about payments infrastructure
Please don't message about
  • Recruiters for roles outside my stack
  • SEO and link-building offers
  • Crypto token projects

Checks messages twice a week

Skills
PCI DSSgRPCidempotencyKafka
HiringHiring for a role
closes in 3 months

7 frontend engineer roles open on the payments platform team in Hong Kong

Role
Frontend engineer
Level
Senior
Type
Full-time
Work mode
Hybrid
Compensation
$168k-$215k + equity
Team
Payments platform, 14 people
Start
This quarter
Must have
Production experience with Kafka Production experience with gRPC Clear written communication
Process
Decision within 10 days

Comp S$129k-S$215k. One technical chat and a paid trial day. Message me with one thing you shipped that you're proud of.

Hong Kongkafkapci dssgrpc
Open

Experience

  1. CTO
    Dec 2023 - Present
    Forge Studio · 2 yr 11 mo · Full-time · Hong Kong
    • Grew the payments platform team from 3 to 35 engineers.
    • Built the experimentation framework 17 product teams use to ship changes safely.
    • Led the migration of 12 services to gRPC.
  2. Director of Engineering
    Aug 2020 - Dec 2023
    Xero · 3 yr 4 mo · Full-time · Hong Kong
    • Shipped 21 launches on the payments platform team without a rollback.
  3. Staff Backend Engineer
    Apr 2018 - Apr 2020
    KPMG · 2 yr · Full-time · Hong Kong
    • Shipped 19 launches on the payments platform team without a rollback.
  4. Principal Engineer
    Apr 2016 - Apr 2018
    UOB · 2 yr · Full-time · Hong Kong
    • Backed 54 founders at pre-seed and seed.
    • Previously an operator for 12 years before investing.
  5. Backend Engineer
    Aug 2013 - Jan 2016
    Carousell · 2 yr 5 mo · Full-time · Hong Kong
    • Reduced cloud spend on payments platform by 38% in two quarters.

Projects

Payments infrastructure benchmark
2026

Reproducible benchmarks comparing PCI DSS and idempotency on real workloads.

Conference talk: lessons from payments platform
2026

What went wrong and what worked while scaling payments infrastructure.

References

No references yet.

Education

  1. University of Sydney
    BEng, Computer Science
    2000 - 2004

Details

Compensation expectations
What they are targeting for their next role.
Visible to connections
Direct contact details
Direct email and a scheduling link.
Visible to connections

Trusted Partners

SponsoredExplore all sites on OneLifeVibe (opens onelifevibe.com in a new tab)