Elliott Polk

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

Principal Engineer | AI Engineering Platforms, Developer Experience, and Edge Systems

I build platforms for engineers working in complicated environments. Over more than 20 years, that has meant architecting in-flight data management tooling, connecting 3D printers and intelligent manufacturing devices, prototyping aviation hardware, modernizing financial platforms, consolidating source control globally, and defining how enterprises evaluate, govern, and evolve coding agents.

The domain changes, but the work has a consistent shape: find the real system boundary, make the architecture legible, and give teams a reliable foundation they can extend. I operate as a hands-on principal engineer and technical authority, moving between implementation, platform strategy, engineering standards, cross-team alignment, mentoring, and incident response.

Core Capabilities

  • AI Tooling and Orchestration: Agent evaluation harnesses, testing-oracle assessment, autonomous test suite design and evolution, multi-run confidence modeling, portable agent profiles, multi-agent squad patterns, LLM orchestration.
  • Enterprise DevEx and Platforms: Internal developer platforms, CI/CD and DevSecOps governance, OCI artifact lineage, GitHub Enterprise, repository metadata and compliance, workload isolation.
  • Edge and Hardware Integration: Computer vision prototyping, constrained-network data sync, distributed device farms, hardware-bridge APIs, offline-capable edge clients.
  • High-Stakes Technical Ownership: Technical direction through prolonged critical outages affecting millions of customers; governance across security, reliability, ownership, and operational accountability.
  • Polyglot Systems Engineering: Go, Python, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, SQL/NoSQL, distributed architectures, container orchestration (Docker/Kubernetes).

Professional Experience

Manulife

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

  • Global Platform Architecture: 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.
  • Source Code Consolidation: Led the consolidation of Bitbucket, GitHub Enterprise Server, and GitHub Enterprise Cloud into one managed platform with unified access, contribution, and compliance controls.
  • Enterprise Repository Governance: Expanded the repository governance, metadata, engineering standards, and compliance model proven within the business and delivery organization into a global enterprise capability with shared contribution and ratification paths.
  • Agentic Evaluation Foundations: Built evidence-driven foundations for agent-assisted engineering: cross-tool coding-agent benchmarks, repeatable evaluation harnesses, repository-readiness analysis, testing-oracle assessment, and multi-run confidence modeling with equivalence scoring over exact-match logic.
  • Testing-Oracle Tooling: Designed and built specialized agents to audit enterprise repositories for legacy testing patterns and to autonomously revamp codebases toward a target-state testing architecture.
  • Repository-Aware Agent Patterns: Designed and coded defensive patterns that help agents recognize institutional scar tissue, widen context, and avoid locally plausible but operationally unsafe changes.
  • Container Management Strategy: Shaped an enterprise container-management paved road spanning build, inspection, qualification, deployment, observability, evidence, OCI artifact lineage, signing, promotion, and workload isolation.

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

  • Repository Governance Model: 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.
  • Lifecycle Tooling: Directed engineering tools that governed source code from repository creation through decommissioning, keeping repositories accountable throughout their lifecycle.
  • DevSecOps Automation: Defined composable CI/CD and DevSecOps practices with standard security and test interfaces, traceable exceptions, and automated controls.
  • Security Foundations: Advanced shared engineering templates and practices using GitHub Advanced Security, Snyk, and container image scanning, creating the foundation later expanded through Global ETS.
  • Container Workload Governance: Built automated pipelines for container build inspection, OCI artifact lineage, signing, promotion, and workload isolation.

Chief Engineer, Canadian Retirements | Global Wealth & Asset Management
September 2018 to April 2020 | Toronto, Ontario, Canada

  • Data and Calculation Platform: Led engineering of a platform that normalized changing provider datasets, executed established pricing models, and generated configurable projected variants for audit and reporting.
  • Post-Acquisition Consolidation: Reshaped a three-system landscape created through acquisition, abstracting two core platforms while removing a vendor-introduced third source of truth.
  • High-Stakes Technical Authority: Guided engineering teams as the primary hands-on technical decision-maker through prolonged critical outages affecting millions of North American customers.

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

  • Price-Validation Platform: Led a small engineering team building a platform that transformed fluid source datasets into consistent, auditable reporting outputs.
  • Forward-Looking Design: Designed the platform to absorb changing data structures and future analytical use cases without repeated foundational rewrites.

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

  • Monolith to Distributed Systems: Architected and built a distributed Go and MongoDB platform to replace a legacy VB.NET cash-redistribution desktop application.
  • Offline-Capable Modernization: Modernized an investment-agent platform from ASP.NET and SQL Server to .NET Core and MongoDB, using local Realm databases to enable full offline operation for field agents.
  • Team Foundations: 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

  • Safety-Critical Edge Architecture: Architected and led development of a globally distributed Electronic Flight Bag platform for processing, managing, and delivering pilot flight plans and operational data across a Go backend, iPad client, and offline-capable in-aircraft .NET edge client.
  • Aviation Computer Vision: Designed and prototyped 3D scanning systems for aircraft maintenance and baggage operations, plus OCR tooling to recognize cargo container placement and orientation, using both consumer hardware and custom purpose-built devices.
  • Cloud and Container Strategy: Led early architecture and implementation of the APAC drive toward cloud and container-based workflows, building distributed proofs of concept with Docker, MongoDB, and web and mobile applications while contributing to regional PaaS and DevOps strategy.
  • Connected Lounge System: 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.
  • UAV and Autonomous Hardware: Conducted R&D on UAV and UGV operational systems, electronic baggage tags, beacon management, mobile subscriptions, and push-notification patterns for aviation operations.
  • Operational Systems: 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

  • Manufacturing Platform: Designed and implemented a Go platform for end-to-end manufacturing management, spanning marketplace, community, administration, and inventory capabilities.
  • Distributed Device Farms: Led early development of a distributed system connecting intelligent injection molders, 3D printers, and CNC machines under a unified management model operated from edge clients.
  • Hardware Bridge Tooling: Built a Chrome Packaged App host for a custom 3D printer, bypassing traditional heavy drivers to extend control to any compatible device, including low-cost Chromebooks.

Travelzen

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

  • Search Engine Architecture: Re-architected the main flight search engine to retrieve inventory concurrently across external partner APIs while matching private and special fares held locally in real time.
  • Data Pipeline Acceleration: Migrated large real-time datasets from Oracle to in-memory MySQL clusters to drastically reduce user wait time.
  • Booking Prototypes: Prototyped booking experiences including drag-and-drop carts, multi-level fare grouping, and lowest-fare trend grids.

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 bandwidth-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.

Open Source

  • Agentic Kernel: Built and maintain the open-source Agentic Kernel, a platform-agnostic system for portable agent profiles, persistent context, skills, and workflows across multiple LLM providers, which also serves as the foundational architecture for the specialized Journal Kernel variant.

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, Go, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, SQL, Objective-C, Swift, PHP
Platforms: Distributed systems, 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, CodeQL, SARIF, CTRF, artifact provenance, observability architecture, identity and access controls
AI Engineering: Coding agents, multi-agent systems, portable agent profiles, skills, 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