Elliott Polk

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

Principal Software Engineer | AI and Performance-Critical Platforms | Distributed Systems

I am a principal software engineer with more than 20 years of experience building production platforms where performance, system boundaries, and cross-team execution matter. My work spans distributed services, data-intensive financial systems, developer platforms, AI-engineering foundations, mobile software, and hardware-connected manufacturing and aviation systems.

I have led engineering and system design across Python, Go, C and C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, and SQL environments. I define interfaces, module boundaries, extension points, and operating contracts; modernize brittle systems; debug critical failures; and turn ambiguous technical constraints into clear engineering decisions that teams can implement and extend. I remain hands-on while leading code and design reviews, roadmap decisions, engineering standards, cross-functional alignment, mentoring, and incident response.

Strengths

  • System and interface engineering: Defined large-system boundaries, service contracts, APIs, extension points, and implementation patterns across distributed platforms, data systems, developer infrastructure, and connected devices.
  • Performance-minded systems engineering: Reworked flight search, real-time data processing, image transfer, pricing, and distributed delivery systems where latency, throughput, constrained resources, or operational reliability shaped the design.
  • Software and hardware integration: Built platforms around 3D printers, intelligent injection molders, CNC machines, aviation devices, mobile clients, and custom prototypes, translating physical constraints into workable software designs.
  • AI engineering and evaluation: Developed repeatable coding-agent benchmarks, evaluation harnesses, testing-oracle methods, confidence models, repository-readiness analysis, and tool-agnostic agent systems.
  • Technical leadership under pressure: Set engineering direction across teams, explained tradeoffs to technical and non-technical stakeholders, mentored engineering leads, and guided incident response during outages affecting millions of customers.

Professional Experience

Manulife

Principal Platform Engineer, Global Enterprise Technology Services August 2024 to Present | Hong Kong SAR

  • Took the repository governance, metadata, engineering standards, and compliance model proven within the business and delivery organization and expanded it into a global enterprise capability with shared contribution and ratification paths.
  • Led the consolidation of Bitbucket, GitHub Enterprise Server, and GitHub Enterprise Cloud into one managed source code platform with consistent access, contribution, and compliance controls.
  • Led the system design for global and region-constrained internal developer platforms, including actor contracts, service boundaries, orchestration flows, and extension points across five platform planes.
  • Shaped an enterprise container-management strategy and paved road spanning build, inspection, qualification, deployment, observability, evidence, OCI artifact lineage, signing, promotion, and workload isolation.
  • Built evidence-driven foundations for agent-assisted engineering, including cross-tool coding-agent benchmarks, repeatable evaluation harnesses, repository-readiness analysis, testing-oracle assessment, and multi-run confidence modeling.
  • Turned repository metadata and cloud tagging from fragmented standards into a reviewable engineering program focused on ownership, application traceability, provenance, continuous validation, and sustainable governance.

Chief Engineer, Global Wealth and Asset Management April 2020 to August 2024 | Toronto, Ontario, Canada

  • Established repository governance and a machine-readable metadata model across the business and delivery organization, making ownership, lifecycle state, audit posture, and operational routing visible.
  • Directed engineering tools that governed source code from repository creation through decommissioning, ensuring that repositories remained accountable throughout their lifecycle.
  • Defined composable CI/CD and DevSecOps practices with standard security and test interfaces, traceable exceptions, and automated controls.
  • Advanced shared engineering templates and practices using GitHub Advanced Security, Snyk, and container image scanning, creating the foundation later expanded through Global ETS.

Chief Engineer, Canadian Retirements, Global Wealth and Asset Management September 2018 to April 2020 | Montreal, Quebec, Canada

  • Led the engineering of a data and calculation platform that normalized changing provider datasets, executed established pricing models, and generated configurable projected variants for audit and reporting.
  • Reshaped a three-system landscape created through acquisition, abstracting two core platforms while removing a vendor-introduced third source of truth.
  • Guided engineering teams through prolonged critical outages affecting millions of North American customers, providing technical direction and sustained decision-making under pressure.

Lead Engineer, Global Wealth and Asset Management December 2017 to September 2018 | Montreal, Quebec, Canada

  • Led a small engineering team building a price-validation platform that transformed fluid source datasets into consistent, auditable reporting outputs.
  • Designed the platform to absorb changing data structures and future analytical use cases without requiring repeated foundational rewrites.

Lead Engineer, Global Wealth and Asset Management November 2016 to December 2017 | Hong Kong SAR

  • Architected a distributed Go and MongoDB platform to replace a legacy VB.NET cash-redistribution desktop application.
  • Modernized an investment-agent platform from ASP.NET and SQL Server to .NET Core and MongoDB, enabling a more distributed architecture and offline operation.
  • Established foundational engineering practices for the Hong Kong team while mentoring engineers through platform design and delivery.

Cathay Pacific Airways

Senior Research Developer April 2014 to November 2016 | Hong Kong SAR

  • Architected and led development of a globally distributed platform for processing, managing, and delivering pilot flight plans and operational data across a Go backend, iPad client, and in-aircraft .NET client, defining interfaces across distinct runtime and connectivity constraints.
  • Led the early architecture and implementation of the APAC drive toward cloud and container-based workflows, developing distributed proofs of concept with Docker, MongoDB, web and mobile applications while contributing to regional PaaS and DevOps strategy.
  • Designed and prototyped electronic baggage tag concepts for digital baggage handling.
  • Developed 3D scanning prototypes for aircraft maintenance and baggage operations, translating the constraints of consumer and custom-built hardware into usable software designs.
  • Designed and delivered a connected customer-management system across airport lounges, enabling ground crews to register passengers, coordinate between locations, and provide travelers with timely, relevant information.
  • Researched UAV and UGV systems, beacon management, mobile subscriptions, and push-notification patterns for aviation operations.
  • Delivered additional mobile and server-side systems for crew rostering, reporting, data collection, operational management, and mapping.

Makible Ltd.

Chief Software Engineer May 2012 to April 2014 | Hong Kong SAR

  • Designed and implemented a Go platform for end-to-end manufacturing management, spanning marketplace, community, administration, and inventory capabilities.
  • Led early architecture and development of a distributed device-farm system connecting intelligent injection molders, 3D printers, and CNC machines through a unified control model.
  • Built a Chrome Packaged App host for a custom 3D printer, separating the device interface from the client platform and extending access to low-cost Chromebooks.

Travelzen

Senior Software Engineer February 2011 to April 2012 | Hong Kong SAR

  • Prototyped booking experiences including drag-and-drop carts, multi-level fare grouping, and lowest-fare trend grids.
  • Migrated large real-time datasets from Oracle to in-memory MySQL to reduce latency in customer-facing searches.
  • Re-architected the main flight search engine for faster inventory retrieval across partners and ticketing vendors while preserving complex private-fare matching.

Earlier Experience

AGATHA Asia-Pacific Ltd., IT Manager and Senior Software Developer | 2009 to 2011 Led IT delivery and extended a Java ERP and POS platform for multi-region boutique management.

Clickability, Support Specialist and Web Programmer | 2007 to 2009 Supported high-profile customers on a proprietary web CMS and built Java integration tools that transformed and synchronized CSV, XML, text, and image content through private APIs.

Republic ITS, IT Developer | 2007 Built internal support tooling with ASP .NET and SQL Server and prototyped mobile applications for BlackBerry and Windows Mobile.

CSAA / AAA, Web Developer and IT Developer II | 2005 to 2007 Built operational tools in C# and SQL Server, including a Windows Mobile application that compressed and transmitted large field images over constrained 3G networks.

AI Engineering Research

  • Agent evaluation: Defined a benchmarking model based on target activities, repeatable harnesses, ground references, equivalence rather than exact-match scoring, and multi-run analysis.
  • Trustworthy validation: Framed testing-oracle quality as the central constraint in generating useful tests for legacy and dependency-coupled systems.
  • Agentic spec-driven development: Developed an artifact model that carries intent from tickets and architecture inputs into executable specifications and validation criteria.
  • Confidence and governance: Modeled confidence as evidence accumulated over time across task classes, domains, consistency, constraint adherence, variance, and recovery behavior.
  • Repository-aware assistance: Developed a defensive-pattern lens that helps agents recognize institutional scar tissue, widen context, and avoid locally plausible but operationally unsafe changes.
  • Composable agent systems: Built the open-source Journal Kernel, a platform-agnostic system for portable agent profiles, skills, workflows, persistent context, and thin provider integrations.

Talks, Advisory, and Community

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

Technology

Languages: Python, C, C++, Go, C#, Java, JavaScript, SQL, Objective-C, Swift, PHP Software Engineering: Production software systems, API and interface design, module boundaries, extension points, distributed systems, software and hardware integration Platforms: Performance-sensitive backend services, internal developer platforms, platform orchestration, Docker, Kubernetes, OCI artifacts, web and mobile systems Data: MongoDB, MySQL, Oracle, SQL Server, data pipelines, normalization, repository metadata Engineering Infrastructure: GitHub Enterprise Cloud, GitHub Enterprise Server, Bitbucket, CI/CD, automated testing, benchmarking, debugging, CodeQL, SARIF, CTRF, artifact provenance, observability architecture AI Engineering: Coding agents, multi-agent systems, portable agent profiles, agent orchestration, evaluation harnesses, ground-reference design, agent instructions, spec-driven development

Education

Art Institute of San Francisco Visual and Game Programming, 2004 to 2005

City College of San Francisco Computer Science, 2002 to 2004