Elliott Polk

United States / Canada / Hong Kong SAR
elliott@tkwcafe.com @elliottpolk @elliottpolk

Summary

Principal engineer and leader with experience spanning finance, aviation, manufacturing, travel, enterprise platforms, mobile systems, and R&D-heavy technical work. Background includes system re-architecture, distributed platform design, hands-on engineering leadership, source code management governance and standards design, and structured research on agent-assisted software delivery in enterprise settings.

Areas of Focus

  • Software engineering and systems architecture, with emphasis on distributed systems, platform design, legacy modernization, and full-stack delivery.
  • Engineering enablement through architecture work, repository analysis, documentation assessment, instruction-layer review, standards design, and practice contribution models for AI-assisted software delivery.
  • Research and methodology development for agentic engineering in enterprise settings, including benchmarking, evaluation harness design, ground-reference-based assessment, confidence modeling, and repository-aware AI behavior.

Professional Experience

Manulife

Principal Engineering Architect, Global Enterprise Technology Services
August 2024 to Present, Hong Kong SAR

  • Progressed to principal architecture leadership within Manulife after advancing through senior engineering roles over more than nine years.
  • Authored structured research topics on testing oracles, agentic spec-driven development, agentic confidence and governance, and defensive patterns in enterprise codebases.
  • Developed a benchmarking framework for coding agents centered on Target Activity modeling, repeatable testing harnesses, ground-reference-based evaluation, and multi-run assessment of non-deterministic systems.
  • Defined evaluation dimensions across functional, risk, and operational characteristics, including adherence, accuracy, quality, consistency, access model, availability, maintainability, performance, scalability, and observability.
  • Formalized behavioral variables affecting coding-agent evaluation, including repository instruction layers, custom personas, vendor defaults, and hosting middleware.
  • Conducted repository analysis across regional codebases, reviewing README quality, copilot-instructions.md usage, build reproducibility, and CodeQL findings to assess onboarding and AI-assisted development readiness.
  • Explored repository-level standards and guidance patterns for coding agents, including AGENTS.md usage and internal standards discussions around generalist and specialist coding agents.
  • Developed research framing for repository-aware AI assistance, including defensive-pattern analysis as an input to safer human and agent interaction with enterprise codebases.
  • Investigated agentic workflows for software delivery, including spec synthesis, test-gap identification, confidence assessment, and enterprise governance considerations.

AVP Principal Software Engineer, Global Enterprise Technology Services
March 2020 to August 2024, Toronto, Ontario, Canada

  • Oversaw consolidation of multiple source code management platforms, including Bitbucket, GitHub Enterprise Server, and GitHub Enterprise Cloud, into a single global managed enterprise platform.
  • Designed approved global standards for source code management covering organization access, repository access, repository metadata, and branching strategy.
  • Standardized repository governance around team-based access, least privilege, protected branches, pull-request-based change flow, auditable exceptions, and automated compliance validation.
  • Established a machine-readable repository metadata model to improve ownership discovery, lifecycle visibility, operational routing, and governance automation across repositories.
  • Designed a distributed contribution model for engineering practices and standards using repository-native workflows, enabling governed collaboration across architecture and engineering in a globally distributed enterprise with varying regional and regulatory needs.

Chief Software Engineer, Global Wealth & Asset Management
September 2019 to March 2020

  • Designed an early repository metadata pattern for Global Wealth & Asset Management to improve ownership clarity, accountability, lifecycle visibility, and operational discoverability across repositories.
  • Extended reporting and monitoring capabilities used to assess application portfolio health, ownership, and accountability.
  • Introduced early coding-agent and AI-assisted engineering tooling, including GitHub Copilot, into engineering workflows and team practices.
  • Defined foundational DevSecOps design patterns for composable self-serve CI/CD workflows, traceable security exception handling, and expected interfaces based on formats such as SARIF and CTRF.
  • Led and consulted engineering teams during prolonged critical system outages affecting millions of North American customers, supporting sustained incident response, technical coordination, and recovery.

Lead Software Engineer, Global Wealth & Asset Management
November 2016 to September 2019

  • Developed foundational engineering practices for the Hong Kong Global Wealth & Asset Management engineering team.
  • Designed and led the engineering team, while contributing directly to implementation, on a platform that included a data pipeline for disparate datasets, normalization workflows, and calculation of existing pricing models alongside projected variants driven by configurable parameters.
  • Designed the platform for future AI-oriented analysis of fluid data structures, enabling variant generation and adaptation to mutating third-party data-provider structures without requiring platform rebuild or recompilation.
  • Consulted on and contributed to the redesign of a three-system platform landscape created through acquisition, with the objective of abstracting the two core backing platforms while removing a third vendor-introduced source of truth.

Cathay Pacific Airways

Senior Mobile Developer
April 2014 to November 2016, Hong Kong

  • Architected and led a small team to revamp a legacy cash-redistribution application from a VB .NET desktop system into a Go-based distributed web application backed by MongoDB.
  • Architected and led a small team to revamp and expand a legacy ASP .NET application for investment agents, redesigning it toward a distributed .NET Core system backed by MongoDB.
  • Assisted in defining PaaS and DevOps strategy for the APAC region.
  • Conducted R&D on hardware and software prototypes including UAV and UGV systems, electronic baggage tags, and 3D scanning concepts for aviation use cases.
  • Developed distributed proof-of-concept work using Docker, MongoDB, web applications, beacon management, mobile subscriptions, and push notifications.
  • Built application proofs of concept for data analysis and aircraft documentation on consumer and purpose-built hardware.
  • Delivered server-side and mobile applications supporting rostering, reporting, data collection, management, and mapping.

Makible Ltd.

Chief Software Engineer
May 2012 to April 2014, Hong Kong

  • Designed and implemented a Go-based platform for end-to-end manufacturing management, including marketplace, blogging, community features, administration, and inventory management.
  • Conducted early-stage development of a distributed system for managing device “farm” environments spanning intelligent injection molders, 3D printers, and CNC machines.
  • Designed and implemented a Chrome Packaged App host application for a custom-built 3D printing system to support cross-device usage, including Chromebooks.

Travelzen

Sr. Software Engineer
February 2011 to April 2012

  • Prototyped new product and booking features including drag-and-drop shopping cart behavior, multi-level fare grouping, and lowest-fare trending grids.
  • Migrated Oracle databases to in-memory MySQL databases to reduce wait time for large, real-time datasets.
  • Re-architected the main flight search engine to improve retrieval performance across partners and ticketing vendors while matching against special and private fare inventory.

AGATHA Asia-Pacific Ltd.

IT Manager / Sr. Software Developer
December 2009 to February 2011

  • Maintained and extended a Java-based ERP and POS system used for multi-region boutique management.

Clickability

Support Specialist / Web Programmer
April 2007 to October 2009

  • Maintained HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and Velocity-based sites for high-profile clients running on a proprietary web CMS.
  • Built and maintained standalone Java applications to synchronize CSV, XML, and text-based data into the CMS via private APIs, including content transformations such as image resizing and styling adjustments.

Republic ITS

IT Developer
January 2007 to April 2007

  • Developed an internal IT support ticketing system using ASP .NET and SQL Server.
  • Prototyped mobile software technologies including BlackBerry and Windows Mobile for data tracking and support use cases.

CSAA / AAA

Web Developer / IT Developer II
2005 to 2007

  • Built tools for IT operations using C# and SQL Server for Windows Mobile devices and Windows-based PCs.
  • Developed an image-compression application for Windows Mobile devices to store and transmit large images over constrained 3G networks.
  • Built and maintained reports using Crystal Reports.

Selected Research and Methodology Work

Agent Benchmarking and Evaluation Methodology

  • Developed a benchmarking framework for coding agents that models work as Target Activity, defined as Practice Domain × Work Domain × Target.
  • Framed evaluation around repeatable testing harnesses and ground references, with equivalence-based scoring rather than exact output matching.
  • Defined characteristic categories spanning functional, risk, and operational analysis, and identified properties such as autonomy level, surface, session boundaries, and context limits as relevant to evaluation design.
  • Positioned repeated observation and statistical significance as necessary for evaluating non-deterministic coding agents.

Testing Oracles and Trustworthy Validation

  • Researched testing-oracle quality as a central constraint in trustworthy test generation for legacy and dependency-coupled repositories.
  • Defined a workflow pattern spanning repository analysis, behavioral specification, test-gap identification, generated or improved tests, and evaluation of whether those tests are trustworthy enough to improve confidence.

Agentic Spec-Driven Development

  • Investigated AI-driven spec-driven development as a methodology in which engineering effort shifts toward expressing intent, constraints, and outcomes through structured artifacts.
  • Explored artifact chains connecting tickets, design inputs, and architecture material to structured specifications that agents and humans can act on.
  • Identified divergence between locally plausible code and intended outcomes as a core failure mode in agentic delivery workflows.

Confidence and Governance for Agentic Systems

  • Developed a framing for confidence as a time-dependent, evidence-backed construct for coding and agentic systems in enterprise settings.
  • Identified candidate confidence dimensions including success, consistency, calibration, adherence to constraints, variance, and recovery behavior.
  • Positioned confidence as a governance-relevant construct rather than a generic benchmark score.

Defensive Patterns and Repository-Aware AI Assistance

  • Developed an analytic lens for defensive patterns in enterprise codebases, framing them as rational responses to brittle systems, documentation gaps, delivery pressure, and operational risk.
  • Connected defensive-pattern analysis to repository audits, repository-level agent guidance, and safer AI-assisted engineering.

Talks, Advisory, and Community

  • Advisor, Cathay Pacific Cloud Vision Working Group.
  • Speaker, MongoDB Enterprise Development / FinTech Development.
  • Presenter, Codeaholics HK.
  • Presenter, Hong Kong World Internet Developer Summit 2014.
  • Resident Developer Panelist, W.D.I. Final Project Presentation at General Assembly.

Technology

Languages and Application Development
Go, Python, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, PHP, SQL, Objective-C, Swift, HTML, CSS

Platforms and Architecture
Distributed systems, platform architecture, web applications, mobile systems, Windows-based platforms, Chrome Packaged Apps

Data and Storage
MongoDB, MySQL, Oracle, SQL Server, data pipelines, normalization workflows

DevSecOps, SCM, and Engineering Governance
GitHub Enterprise, GitHub Enterprise Server, GitHub Enterprise Cloud, Bitbucket, CI/CD workflows, repository metadata, branching strategy, protected-branch governance, CodeQL, SARIF, CTRF

AI-Assisted Engineering and Research Tooling
GitHub Copilot, coding-agent benchmarking, testing harness design, ground-reference-based evaluation, repository instruction patterns, AGENTS.md, copilot-instructions.md

Education

San Francisco Art Institute, 2003 to 2004.
City College of San Francisco, Computer Science, 2004 to 2005.
Art Institute of San Francisco, Visual and Game Programming, 2002 to 2004.