Christopher Ngai
Staff Software Engineer
Full-stack engineer with 6+ years of experience building and scaling products from the ground up. Collaborates cross-functionally with product, design, and customers to turn ambiguous problems into meaningful product experiences with a focus on rapid iteration, strong UX, and measurable impact.
Experience
Staff Software Engineer
Grew from intern to Staff Engineer over 6 years at a tech-forward veterinary company, helping scale products to 90,000 members and $95M revenue.
- •Drove $1.2M ARR by architecting Autoship subscriptions (billing, EMR, e-commerce), reaching 2,600+ active subs and doubling ship dispense rate from 5% to 10% in 6 months.
- •Led integration with one of the nation's largest pet pharmacies, shipping 10k+ orders with zero major incidents, expanding catalog by 3x, and saving 190+ ops hours/week.
- •Introduced AI dev workflows across a 14-engineer team, building Slack-to-GitHub automation on AWS Lambda and driving adoption of agentic coding tools, saving 400+ hours/year.
Projects
Founding Engineer
Building a back-to-basics social app: chronological feed, no algorithms, no vanity metrics. Built with Swift, Go, ScyllaDB. 100+ beta users in first month.
- •Designed and shipped a fast, fluid media experience end-to-end with real-time Websocket feed, multi-image/video posting, and a custom media pipeline handling compression and transcoding.
- •Building Go backend on self-hosted Kubernetes with ScyllaDB and Cloudflare Workers CDN, optimizing for low-latency media delivery.
Education
B.S. Computer Science & Engineering
Dean's Honors List
Web Development Director
- •Managed team of 10 developers building web and mobile apps for campus-wide events.
- •Built Bruin Bash concert website serving 40,000+ UCLA students.
Skills
Languages
TypeScript, JavaScript, Python
Frontend
React, React Native, GraphQL, Apollo, Redux, Zustand
Backend
Django, PostgreSQL, Celery, Redis, Strawberry GraphQL
AI Tooling
Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, GitHub Copilot, MCP, Langchain
Cloud & Infra
AWS (ECS, Lambda, S3, CloudFront), Google Cloud, Docker
Testing
Jest, React Testing Library
Interests
- •Cooking
- •Puzzles
- •Soccer
- •3D Printing
- •Golf
- •Asian Literature
Cooking
Always experimenting with new cuisines. My kitchen doubles as a food lab and cultural deep dive.
Puzzles
Jigsaw puzzles as meditation. There's something deeply satisfying about finding order in a pile of chaos.
Soccer
Playing since I was 5 and still at it. Grew up enjoying Bayern Munich and Barcelona.
3D Printing
Recently got a Bambu A1 Mini and been printing practical things. Early days, but fully hooked.
Golf
Picked it up as an adult hobby and fully embracing the beginner's journey. Still trying to find the fairway.
Asian Literature
Drawn to surrealist storytelling and rich cultural atmosphere. Currently deep into Murakami and Uketsu.