Lucas ChenSet LC · 20 cards, back to the top

Set LCCareer edition · 20 cards

Lucas Chen

Software Engineer at Zynga, AdTech · Toronto, Canada

Software engineer building AI tooling and ad tech at Zynga.

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In this pack

Lucas Chen

Since 2021

Software Engineer — AdTechHolo rare

Software engineer building AI tooling and ad tech at Zynga.

“Outside work, I automate things I'd rather not do by hand.”

Base
Toronto
Team
AdTech
Alma
McMaster
LC001/020Player card

Lucas ChenCard back

I'm a software engineer on Zynga's AdTech team in Toronto. I designed and led our internal tooling for ad-serving configurations, an MCP (Model Context Protocol) server and tools that let AI assistants work with ad-serving configuration, and a project that helps our games identify high-value ads. I also worked on an AI LiveOps agent that cut a 2–3 hour workflow to about 20 minutes.

Outside work, I automate things I'd rather not do by hand. My longest-running side project started in 2023 as a Playwright script that booked my parents' tennis courts the moment booking opened; it's now a TypeScript monorepo with a web app, an API and a bot that runs every morning on a Raspberry Pi. Right now I'm building a platform for delegating software work to coding agents, where results have to be verified independently instead of taken on the agent's word.

LC001/020

Tab 016 cards

Role cards

Every role is a card, newest first. Flip one to read all its abilities.

Active In play now

  • Zynga

    In play

    Software Engineer — AdTechHolo rare

    Designed and led internal tooling for ad-serving configurations: an MCP (Model Context Protocol) server and tools that let AI assistants work with ad-serving configuration.

    AdTech team: AI tooling and ad projects.

    Term
    Now
    Moves
    3
    Stack
    —
    LC002/020Holo rare

    ZyngaCard back

    May 2025 – Present · Toronto, ON

    1. Designed and led internal tooling for ad-serving configurations: an MCP (Model Context Protocol) server and tools that let AI assistants work with ad-serving configuration.
    2. Worked on an AI LiveOps agent that cut a workflow from 2–3 hours to about 20 minutes.
    3. Designed and led a project that helps games identify high-value ads.
    LC002/020

Deck list 6 roles

  1. 002Holo rareZyngaSoftware EngineerMay 2025 – Present
  2. 003RareHexagon Manufacturing IntelligenceFull Stack Engineering InternMay 2023 – Jun 2024
  3. 004CommonMcMaster UniversityTeaching AssistantSep 2022 – Apr 2023
  4. 005RareExchange SolutionsSoftware Engineering InternMay 2022 – Aug 2022
  5. 006CommonMcMaster Artificial Intelligence SocietyAI Research MemberOct 2021 – 2022
  6. 007RareInsideDeskSoftware Engineering InternJun 2021 – Sep 2021

Played Earlier roles

  • Hexagon

    Full Stack Engineering Intern — InternshipRare

    Developed 15+ UI and 10+ API production features for the Nexus Platform, using React and Express with TypeScript.

    Term
    2023–2024
    Moves
    4
    Stack
    7
    LC003/020Rare

    HexagonCard back

    Hexagon Manufacturing Intelligence
    May 2023 – Jun 2024

    1. Developed 15+ UI and 10+ API production features for the Nexus Platform, using React and Express with TypeScript.
    2. Reduced load times for user list pages by 97% by optimizing API calls and refining Express APIs.
    3. Cut test automation start-up time by up to 98% by parallelizing the Playwright test suite setup.
    4. Reduced API response time by up to 82% with an Azure Cosmos DB proxy that moved Express APIs to C# .NET database pagination.
    • TypeScript
    • React
    • Express
    • C#
    • .NET
    • Azure Cosmos DB
    • Playwright
    LC003/020

  • McMaster TA

    Teaching Assistant — TeachingCommon

    1P13 Integrated Engineering Project (Sep–Dec 2022).

    Term
    2022–2023
    Moves
    2
    Stack
    —
    LC004/020Common

    McMaster TACard back

    McMaster University
    Sep 2022 – Apr 2023 · Hamilton, ON

    1. 1P13 Integrated Engineering Project (Sep–Dec 2022).
    2. 2GA3 Computer Architecture (Jan–Apr 2023).
    LC004/020

  • Exchange Solutions

    Software Engineering Intern — InternshipRare

    Made e-commerce client onboarding over 10x faster by building AWS Lambda components.

    Term
    2022
    Moves
    4
    Stack
    7
    LC005/020Rare

    Exchange SolutionsCard back

    Exchange Solutions
    May 2022 – Aug 2022

    1. Made e-commerce client onboarding over 10x faster by building AWS Lambda components.
    2. Led an augmented reality proof of concept for a national loyalty program, built with 8th Wall WebAR and JavaScript.
    3. Raised a loyalty platform’s user engagement by 4% by integrating it with blockchain assets, using Next.js, Ethereum and the Alchemy API.
    4. Built a real-time data visualization dashboard (D3.js, Snowflake), improving early error catching and data comparisons by over 10%.
    • AWS Lambda
    • JavaScript
    • Next.js
    • D3.js
    • Snowflake
    • 8th Wall WebAR
    • Shopify API
    LC005/020

  • McMaster AI Society

    AI Research Member — ResearchCommon

    Worked with a team of four developers on training a humanoid to walk and navigate obstacles in a ragdoll physics simulation.

    Term
    2021–2022
    Moves
    2
    Stack
    2
    LC006/020Common

    McMaster AI SocietyCard back

    McMaster Artificial Intelligence Society
    Oct 2021 – 2022 · Hamilton, ON

    1. Worked with a team of four developers on training a humanoid to walk and navigate obstacles in a ragdoll physics simulation.
    2. Used C# and Unity to train and simulate the humanoid.
    • C#
    • Unity
    LC006/020

  • InsideDesk

    Software Engineering Intern — InternshipRare

    Found 50+ bugs through QA testing, validated bug fixes, and was the link between clients and the development team.

    Term
    2021
    Moves
    3
    Stack
    4
    LC007/020Rare

    InsideDeskCard back

    InsideDesk
    Jun 2021 – Sep 2021

    1. Found 50+ bugs through QA testing, validated bug fixes, and was the link between clients and the development team.
    2. Cut manual tasks by over 30% with custom JavaScript Slack bots that automate the customer onboarding notifications.
    3. Wrote automated end-to-end UI tests with Selenium and Python, cutting manual QA testing by 40%.
    • JavaScript
    • Python
    • Selenium
    • Slack
    LC007/020

Tab 023 cards

Ability cards

Headline results from Zynga AdTech, each one a holo rare. Move over a card to catch the foil.

Tab 0310 cards

The binder

Side projects, hackathon builds and tools, newest first. Flip a card for what was built.

Page 1 of 2

  • Agent Platform

    Featured

    Tool — Aug 2026 – presentRare

    A control plane for safely delegating software work to autonomous coding agents.

    Solo: spec, design and CLI (in progress)

    Rulebook (case study) GitHub

    Year
    2026
    Stack
    5
    Built
    4
    LC011/020Rare

    Agent PlatformCard back

    A harness-agnostic platform for handing software work to coding agents in Cursor, Claude Code or any other harness. The goal, from my spec: maximize architecture-approved, verified engineering output per dollar and per minute of human attention.

    • Wrote the v3 spec: missions, workflow templates, task and role contracts, review gates, model routing, memory and fleet security.
    • Built the “agent” control-plane CLI in TypeScript: it scaffolds a target repo, validates artifacts against JSON Schemas and runs the claim → start → submit → gate loop.
    • Workers never certify their own work: a task passes only with an evidence bundle, independent verification, and spec, quality and architecture review.
    • Routes each task by risk to a capability tier (frontier, strong, mid, cheap), mapped to models by policy instead of hard-coded vendors.
    • TypeScript
    • Node.js
    • JSON Schema (Ajv)
    • Commander
    • YAML
    LC011/020

  • TennisBooker

    Featured

    Product — 2023 – presentRare

    Books tennis and pickleball courts the moment booking opens, every morning.

    Solo, full-stack (2023 version with help from Douglas Chen)

    Rulebook (case study) GitHub (2023 version)

    Year
    2026
    Stack
    7
    Built
    4
    LC012/020Rare

    TennisBookerCard back

    My parents had to set a 7:30 a.m. alarm every week to get courts at our local club, so I automated it. Members set weekly schedules in a web app, and a bot books the courts each morning and texts the results.

    • The bot logs in at 7:25, builds every reservation, then fires at exactly 7:30 a.m. ET for courts 7 days out, falls back to backup courts and texts results via Twilio.
    • TypeScript monorepo (Turborepo): Express + Prisma/PostgreSQL API with Auth0 roles and machine-to-machine tokens for the bot, and a React, MUI and TanStack Query web app.
    • Runs in Docker on a Raspberry Pi: CI builds multi-arch images to GHCR, deploys go staging → smoke test → promote with one-command rollback, and Vitest and Playwright suites cover the code.
    • Began in 2023 as “Alfred”: a Playwright bot on a cron-scheduled GitLab pipeline, with a React and Express app, Firebase and multi-user Auth0 login, used by 2 clients. In Aug 2026 the bot moved to the booking platform’s new GraphQL API.
    • TypeScript
    • Playwright
    • React
    • Express
    • PostgreSQL
    • Auth0
    • Docker

    With Douglas Chen.

    LC012/020

  • PlatefulAI

    Featured

    Product — Nov – Dec 2024Rare

    Mobile meal planner: pick meals, get a grocery list, track calories and protein.

    Team of 5: app shell, Auth0 login, meal-planning flow, deploy

    Rulebook (case study) Live demo

    Year
    2024
    Stack
    6
    Built
    3
    LC013/020Rare

    PlatefulAICard back

    A mobile-first meal planner: choose meals and servings, turn them into a grocery list, and track calories and protein against personal targets. Our team of five built it as a front-end prototype on mock meal data, so the “AI-powered meal prep” step is a UI concept.

    • Set up the React + Vite app with Auth0 login, the start and home screens and bottom-tab navigation, and deployed it on Vercel.
    • Built the meal-planning flow: favourites, filtering out meals that clash with saved allergies and diets, a meal-details view, and meal and serving selection.
    • Teammates built the grocery list and meal data (Mohammad Mohsin Khan), the calorie and protein tracker (Wajdan Faheem), and profile and target settings (Jasmine Sun-Hu).
    • React
    • Vite
    • MUI
    • Auth0
    • Chart.js
    • Vercel

    With Mohammad Mohsin Khan, Wajdan Faheem, Jasmine Sun-Hu, Hammad.

    LC013/020

  • StudySpot

    Product — Nov 2024Common

    Find a place to study at McMaster: search, filters, ratings, favourites and a map.

    Solo, front-end

    Live demo

    Year
    2024
    Stack
    5
    Built
    3
    LC014/020Common

    StudySpotCard back

    A mobile-first prototype for finding study spots on McMaster’s campus: search and filter spots, save favourites, mark places visited, rate them, and see them on a map around you.

    • Leaflet map centred on the user’s location (falling back to Thode Library), with a marker and rating for each spot.
    • Text search, attribute filters, and spot pages where you can favourite a spot, mark it visited and leave a rating.
    • Runs entirely in the browser: accounts, favourites and visits persist in localStorage. Deployed on Vercel.
    • React
    • Vite
    • Leaflet
    • React Router
    • Vercel
    LC014/020

  • UnPassword

    Hackathon — Nov 2024Uncommon

    A password manager built in one day for the MEC 2024 programming challenge.

    Team: Auth0 login, JWT-secured API, dashboard-to-API wiring

    GitHub

    Year
    2024
    Stack
    7
    Built
    4
    LC015/020Uncommon

    UnPasswordCard back

    A password manager with Auth0 sign-in, an Express API, and passwords encrypted before they are stored in Firebase. I built it in one day with Willie Pai and Mohammad Mohsin Khan for the MEC 2024 programming challenge.

    • Added Auth0 login and logout, plus a client service layer that attaches the user’s access token to every API call.
    • Added JWT verification to the Express API and set up its Vercel deployment.
    • Connected the dashboard to the API for listing, adding and deleting passwords, with password-strength rules on new entries.
    • Merged 13 of the team’s pull requests during the event.
    • React
    • TypeScript
    • Vite
    • Ant Design
    • Express
    • Auth0
    • Firebase

    With Willie Pai, Mohammad Mohsin Khan.

    LC015/020

  • API Resume

    Experiment — Oct 2023Common

    My resume as a REST API: Postman-only, rate-limited, with a joke for anyone who POSTs.

    Solo

    Rulebook (case study) GitHub

    Year
    2023
    Stack
    5
    Built
    3
    LC016/020Common

    API ResumeCard back

    An Express + MongoDB API that serves my resume as JSON, one section at a time or all at once. Inspired by Eric Lake’s API resume.

    • Endpoints for experience, projects, education and contact, a combined /api/resume, and a menu at /api.
    • Only answers Postman (other clients get a 403), rate-limits each IP per day (429), and meets any non-GET request with a joke 500.
    • Express and Mongoose on MongoDB, deployed to Vercel with Vercel Analytics.
    • Node.js
    • Express
    • MongoDB
    • Mongoose
    • Vercel
    LC016/020

  • CarpoolX

    Featured

    Product — Mar – Apr 2023Rare

    Android app that matches riders headed the same way so they can share a taxi.

    Team of 4: repo lead, most of the Flask backend and auth, core screens

    Rulebook (case study) GitHub

    Year
    2023
    Stack
    5
    Built
    4
    LC017/020Rare

    CarpoolXCard back

    CarpoolX matches riders heading to the same destination so they can share a taxi and split the fare, with an upfront fare estimate and safety checks for riding with strangers. Four of us built it as a React Native Android app on a Flask and Firebase backend.

    • Led the repo: scaffold, navigation and a feature-branch workflow. Merged all 38 pull requests that landed and wrote 119 of 156 commits.
    • Wrote most of the MVC Flask backend: multi-user Firebase Auth sign-in, tokens kept in the Android Keystore, token-checked endpoints, and the controller and model layers.
    • Built login and registration, the profile, taxi verification by door code, taxi details and passenger reports.
    • Teammates built ride requests and matching with Google Maps routes and fare estimates (Henushan Bala), end-of-ride ratings (Rafeed Iqbal) and private group rides (Allison Cook).
    • React Native
    • Python
    • Flask
    • Firebase
    • Google Maps Platform

    With Henushan Bala, Rafeed Iqbal, Allison Cook.

    LC017/020

  • Ride Home

    Experiment — Jun 2022Common

    Mix subway sounds, chatter and lo-fi music into your own TTC ride-home ambience.

    Co-created with Quinn Ha; built the app and audio controls

    Live GitHub

    Year
    2022
    Stack
    5
    Built
    4
    LC018/020Common

    Ride HomeCard back

    A small ambient-sound web app inspired by ridethesubway: sliders blend subway ambience, background chatter and lo-fi music over a train illustration by the artist mienar.

    • Independent volume sliders for subway ambience, chatter and music.
    • Light and dark themes that follow the system setting and remember the visitor’s choice.
    • Responsive layout for phones, styled with Sass. Deployed on Netlify.
    • Reached 610 new users in 12 months.
    • React
    • Sass
    • MUI
    • AWS S3
    • Netlify

    With Quinn Ha.

    LC018/020

  • Summary.io

    Hackathon — Jan 2022Uncommon

    Upload a lecture video and get an AI transcript to study from. Built at MacHacks 2.

    Team of 4: AssemblyAI integration, repo setup and write-up

    Devpost Demo video GitHub

    Year
    2022
    Stack
    4
    Built
    3
    LC019/020Uncommon

    Summary.ioCard back

    A study tool for recorded lectures: upload a video, watch it beside an AssemblyAI speech-to-text transcript, and (the plan) drag snippets onto your slides to export as a PDF. In 36 hours our team of four built upload, playback and transcription.

    • Wrote the AssemblyAI calls that submit audio for transcription and fetch the transcript.
    • Set up the repo and React app, merged the Express transcription server, and wrote the README and Devpost story.
    • Teammates built the video upload page and upload server (Douglas Chen) and an Express server that polls AssemblyAI for the finished transcript (Aditya Bhadauriya).
    • React
    • AssemblyAI
    • Node.js
    • Express

    With Douglas Chen, Aditya Bhadauriya, Fady Morcos.

    LC019/020

Page 2 of 2

  • Rest Day

    Award

    Hackathon — Jan 2022Holo rare

    A workout planner that schedules rest days, not just workouts. Built at DeltaHacks 8.

    Team of 2: Fitbit API integration, landing page, deploy

    Rulebook (case study) Devpost GitHub

    Year
    2022
    Stack
    5
    Built
    4
    LC020/020Holo rare

    Rest DayCard back

    ★ 2nd place, “To Work or Not To Workout” sponsor challenge (AI Endurance), DeltaHacks 8

    A weekly workout planner that deliberately schedules rest days, designed to use Fitbit sleep and activity data to decide when to train and when to recover. Willie Pai and I built it in 36 hours at DeltaHacks 8.

    • Wrote the Fitbit Web API client, which pulls 7-day sleep and activity logs and heart-rate data (a standalone Node script, not yet wired into the UI).
    • Built the navigation bar and landing page with styled-components, plus the routes for the other pages.
    • Merged the feature branches, deployed the React app to GitHub Pages, and wrote the README and Devpost story.
    • Willie Pai built the weekly schedule view and the exercise GIFs.
    • React
    • Fitbit Web API
    • styled-components
    • Node.js
    • Figma

    With Willie Pai.

    LC020/020

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Energy types

What powers the cards: each skill group is an energy type, with the tools it fuels.

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Lucas Chen

Software Engineer — AdTech

Zynga · Toronto, Canada · LC 001/020

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