Hi, my name is Jay Chia. I was born in Singapore and graduated from Cornell University magna cum laude with a Bachelor degree in Computer Science, I now reside in the sunny state of California working as a software engineer.

Software Engineer

As an engineer, my work mainly revolves around building cloud infrastructure to enable Machine Learning at scale.

Some things I’ve built:

1. Data warehousing clinical and laboratory data that powers cancer research.
2. High throughput data processing, storage and retrieval for genomic and autonomous vehicle data to power large-scale distributed ML model training and analytics.
3. Neural Networks for lidar and camera-based autonomous vehicle systems as well as multiomic genomic data.
4. Web applications for complex wet-lab workflows managing thousands of clinical trial patients and hundreds of thousands of blood samples producing petabytes of genomic data.

I consider myself as full-stack across web frontend, backend, infrastructure, data and ML, with a strong grounding specifically in data processing and management for Machine Learning and scientific research.

My Past Life

Although I now spend most of my waking time on tech, in my past life I have had experiences in very different fields.

I spent two years in the Singapore Armed Forces, training to be a tank officer and eventually graduating at the top of my officer cadet class as a platoon commander of 48SAR, Singapore’s L2SG main battle tank battalion. I led my platoon through many large military exercises, including major cross-training exercises in Germany (the home of the Leopard tank!).

I also led recruitment and HR for Shopback, a Singaporean ecommerce startup. I hired and built teams from scratch in Malaysia and Indonesia, including country GMs and key technical hires. Shopback is now a Series E company and is one of the hottest companies in the Singapore tech scene. This is where I caught my startup bug!