Lee Zhen Yang, Sebastian

Seattle, WA

A software engineering leader with 15+ years of experience across full-stack development, cloud architecture, and AI/ML systems. Currently leading the engineering team for Amazon’s Investment Management System (IMS), a $74B+ corporate portfolio platform serving 200+ users across 11 business units. Combines deep technical execution with product ownership and people management.

Work Experience

Amazon, Software Development Manager, Seattle, Jun 2024 – Present

Leading product strategy, architecture, and delivery for a $74B+ portfolio management platform serving Corporate Development Finance.

Managed a team of ~3 engineers (SDEs and Data Engineers), owning hiring, onboarding, delivery, and full tech stack upgrades
Built AI chat assistant (Investment Management Assistant) reducing portfolio query time from minutes to 3 seconds for 200+ users — full-stack delivery from Business Requirements Document (BRD) to production (LLM orchestration, React frontend, 96% accuracy)
Delivered reporting platform and cross-org integrations (Finance, FinTech, Accounting, Tax teams), eliminating manual quarterly reporting and saving 175 hours/quarter through automated reconciliation
Reduced API p99 latency 86%; restored $714M+ in portfolio accuracy through systematic database investigation and targeted remediation
Launched platform consolidating 530+ holdings with 6x user growth in Year 1; authored 5-year vision and half-year roadmap with capacity modeling and phased delivery

AWS, Senior Startup Solutions Architect, Singapore, Jun 2022 – Jun 2024

Led a team of 5 Solutions Architects. Technical lead for containers, databases, and AI/ML across ASEAN startups.

Delivered 19 gamified learning events to 496 companies across Asia-Pacific (Customer Satisfaction 4.62/5); built 4 reusable learning modules adopted org-wide; scaled delivery team 8x
Orchestrated 18 database workshops for 772 companies (CSAT 4.71/5); expanded delivery to 4 countries with translated content
Drove measurable customer outcomes: genomics startup (41% revenue growth), data analytics unicorn (20% below planned cloud cost), SME compliance platform (25% cost reduction) — through architecture guidance and optimization
Built “RoboChef” food waste reduction solution showcased at AWS re:Invent 2023 Builder’s Fair; led IoT hardware demo at 7 events across APAC (avg CSAT 4.7/5)
Mentored 7 Solutions Architects and 2 specialist candidates; 3 promoted to higher-level roles

AWS, Startup Solutions Architect, Singapore, Sept 2020 – May 2022

Managed portfolio of 150+ startups including 3 unicorns. Influenced $2M+ ARR.

Drove 30% average cost reduction for startup clients through strategic resource allocation and cloud best practices
Designed and executed 42+ technical workshops across 5 ASEAN markets and 4 customer segments (4.2/5 CSAT)
Retained multi-cloud customer evaluating competitor by delivering architecture PoC that reduced query time from hours to under 1 minute — CTO committed to AWS-first strategy
Authored 6 reusable technical assets (blogs, code samples, videos, e-books) reaching 4,000+ users

Amazon, Software Engineer II (Alexa), Sunnyvale, May 2018 – Sept 2020

Alexa Shopping Notifications — millions of daily notifications across hundreds of millions of devices.

Built comprehensive testing framework unblocking 12 production releases after a 4-month deployment freeze
Resolved critical issue affecting 5% of notification traffic by coordinating across 4 domain teams
Designed CLI tool for Natural Language Understanding (NLU) developers improving work efficiency by 50%

ShopBack, Software Engineer, Singapore, July 2015 – May 2018

Employee #15. Scaled 3→7 countries, 5M+ users, $1B GMV. Raised $40M by Series C.

Built core cashback and merchant integration features serving 2,000+ partners processing 2.5M+ monthly transactions
Led frontend architecture for white-label platform, enabling B2B partnerships that expanded revenue channels
Implemented e2e and unit testing — 80% reduction in reported bugs, supporting 250% YoY order volume growth
Optimized web performance (5+ second improvement), directly impacting conversion rates across 7 markets

Earlier Roles

Afteryou (May 2014 – July 2015): Built mobile app saving housing agents 8 hours/week
CSIT (July 2013 – May 2014): Designed web service architecture improving interoperability and security
Rocketfuel Inc (Jan 2011 – Dec 2011, internship): Built revenue forecasting feature with 95% reliability

Education

National University of Singapore

Master of Computing (Information Systems) — Dec 2013 – Dec 2015
Bachelor of Computing (Information Systems, Minor in Technopreneurship), 2nd Upper Honours — Aug 2009 – July 2013

Stanford University — NUS Overseas Colleges (Exchange Program), Jan 2011 – Dec 2011

Technical Publications & Projects

AWS Workshops (GA)

Database for Developers — delivered to 772+ companies across APAC
EKS Workshop for Startups — reused 54 times in 6 months

AWS Technical Content

ECS Autoscaling with Custom Metrics — blog + code sample
Monitoring Memory Usage in Amazon Lightsail — blog
A Startup Guide to AWS — e-book

Technical Skills

Python, JavaScript/TypeScript, Java, SQL

Flask, SQLAlchemy, Express, REST APIs

React/Redux

AWS (Lambda, CDK, RDS, Bedrock, Glue, Step Functions, CloudWatch)

LLM orchestration, prompt engineering, AI evaluation

PostgreSQL, DynamoDB, S3, ETL pipelines

CI/CD, infrastructure-as-code, Docker

Git