Engineer in Singapore. Seventeen years across software, solutions engineering and product, ten of them in APAC ad tech.
In person, $2 a head
A friendly, hands-on session on your own phone. 10am to 12pm, Marine Crescent.
At Moloco, ad creatives went through a review process that let too many mistakes through. When Gemini 1.5 came out in May 2024 I saw it could do this job. I ran the quality and cost evaluations, wrote the prompts, built the review pipeline and benchmarked it on a large set of real creatives until it was ready for production.
Product and engineering adopted it. It replaced the old creative-review pipeline across Moloco and is still running.
Playable ads are small games that run as ads, and each one used to need a game developer. I built a web and desktop platform where account managers and the creative studio make, release, track and improve playables themselves with Claude and ChatGPT, starting from a library of reusable concepts, components and templates.
It has its own tracking, API integrations and feed hosting, plus an agent workflow that turns a client brief into a finished playable. Playables made with it run in live campaigns every week, and I'm working with product and engineering to bring it into Moloco's AI creative-generation product.
The code is the easy part. Seeing the need from the field is the job.
As technical lead for client integrations across APAC, I sit between sales, account teams and engineering. I turned the repeated parts of that work into tools, dashboards, reusable AI skills and agents.
Much of the routine is now automated, so my time goes to the parts that need a person: discovery, scoping, demos and rollouts.
A Chinese-first poker study site: equity tools, drills, lessons and hand reviews, in Simplified and Traditional Chinese and English. I built the publishing pipeline so articles go through an AI review step and a human kill switch before they go out.
It's live in three languages, and its tools are free and run in the browser without an account.
I'm a software engineer who has spent most of my career in front of customers: solutions engineering at Criteo and Remerge, partner product at AppLovin, customer solutions engineering at Moloco. I find the need in the field, build the tool with AI, put it in front of the people who will use it, then hand it to product and engineering with the evidence.
Outside work I run App Factory, a one-person studio in Singapore that ships iPhone and Android apps and games, built and run with coding agents.
Works with
HQ is the console I built to run App Factory. Every change goes through the same four stages, with agents doing the work and people deciding what ships. This site went through it too.
LIFE-3To do
Build Lei Cao's portfolio at lei-cao.com
Design and build the site, prepare a preview and a public-copy review, and deploy only after approval.
RunWorking
Opus leads; Sonnet and Haiku help
Review2 passes
Two other models read the diff
LandApproved
Merged after approval and a green main
| Company | Role | Years |
|---|---|---|
| Moloco | Customer Solutions Engineer | 2024–now |
| AppLovin | Senior Partner Product Manager | 2022–2023 |
| Remerge | Solutions Engineering Team Lead, APAC | 2019–2022 |
| Criteo | Senior Solutions Engineer | 2016–2019 |
| Zalora | Senior Software Engineer | 2013–2016 |
| Baygle | Software Engineer and co-founder | 2009–2013 |
| Sun Yat-sen University | B.E. in Automation, Guangzhou | 2005–2009 |
|---|
Before AI, the same pattern: a Go rebuild of Zalora's mobile API, integration monitoring at Criteo, a creative template manager at Remerge, partner integrations with Oppo, Vivo, Xiaomi, Samsung and Realme at AppLovin.
App Factory makes calm puzzle games, poker tools and a reading app for Chinese, Japanese and Korean. Most are on the App Store, and Morphsize runs in the browser. appfactory.sg
Singapore
