LiveOps agent
~20 minfrom 2–3 hTime to complete one LiveOps workflow
I worked on an AI LiveOps agent that cut a workflow from 2–3 hours to about 20 minutes.
Now at Zynga · AdTech
Lucas Chen.
Software engineer building AI tooling and ad tech at Zynga.
Changelog
Every release so far.
v6.0May 2025 – Present
CurrentFull-timeSoftware Engineer
Zynga · Toronto, ON
AdTech team: AI tooling and ad projects.
- 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.
- Worked on an AI LiveOps agent that cut a workflow from 2–3 hours to about 20 minutes.
- Designed and led a project that helps games identify high-value ads.
v5.0May 2023 – Jun 2024
InternshipFull Stack Engineering Intern
Hexagon Manufacturing Intelligence
- Developed 15+ UI and 10+ API production features for the Nexus Platform, using React and Express with TypeScript.
- Reduced load times for user list pages by 97% by optimizing API calls and refining Express APIs.
- Cut test automation start-up time by up to 98% by parallelizing the Playwright test suite setup.
- Reduced API response time by up to 82% with an Azure Cosmos DB proxy that moved Express APIs to C# .NET database pagination.
v4.0Sep 2022 – Apr 2023
TeachingTeaching Assistant
McMaster University · Hamilton, ON
- 1P13 Integrated Engineering Project (Sep–Dec 2022).
- 2GA3 Computer Architecture (Jan–Apr 2023).
v3.0May 2022 – Aug 2022
InternshipSoftware Engineering Intern
Exchange Solutions
E-commerce and loyalty platforms: a Shopify app on AWS, plus AR, blockchain and data-visualization work.
- Made e-commerce client onboarding over 10x faster by building AWS Lambda components.
- Led an augmented reality proof of concept for a national loyalty program, built with 8th Wall WebAR and JavaScript.
- Raised a loyalty platform’s user engagement by 4% by integrating it with blockchain assets, using Next.js, Ethereum and the Alchemy API.
- Built a real-time data visualization dashboard (D3.js, Snowflake), improving early error catching and data comparisons by over 10%.
v2.0Oct 2021 – 2022
ResearchAI Research Member
McMaster Artificial Intelligence Society · Hamilton, ON
- Worked with a team of four developers on training a humanoid to walk and navigate obstacles in a ragdoll physics simulation.
- Used C# and Unity to train and simulate the humanoid.
v1.0Jun 2021 – Sep 2021
InternshipSoftware Engineering Intern
InsideDesk
- Found 50+ bugs through QA testing, validated bug fixes, and was the link between clients and the development team.
- Cut manual tasks by over 30% with custom JavaScript Slack bots that automate the customer onboarding notifications.
- Wrote automated end-to-end UI tests with Selenium and Python, cutting manual QA testing by 40%.
Highlights
Now at Zynga, AdTech.
Recent work, kept high-level.
Ad-config MCP
I designed and led internal tooling for ad-serving configurations at Zynga: a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server and tools that let AI assistants work with ad-serving configuration.
High-value ads
I designed and led a project that helps games identify high-value ads.
Recently shipped
Things I’ve shipped.
10 projects, newest first.
Agent Platform
A control plane for safely delegating software work to autonomous coding agents.
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.
Role Solo: spec, design and CLI (in progress)
- TypeScript
- Node.js
- JSON Schema (Ajv)
- Commander
- YAML
TennisBooker
Books tennis and pickleball courts the moment booking opens, every morning.
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.
Role Solo, full-stack (2023 version with help from Douglas Chen)
- TypeScript
- Playwright
- React
- Express
- PostgreSQL
PlatefulAI
Mobile meal planner: pick meals, get a grocery list, track calories and protein.
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.
Role Team of 5: app shell, Auth0 login, meal-planning flow, deploy
- React
- Vite
- MUI
- Auth0
- Chart.js
StudySpot
Find a place to study at McMaster: search, filters, ratings, favourites and a map.
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.
Role Solo, front-end
- React
- Vite
- Leaflet
- React Router
- Vercel
UnPassword
A password manager built in one day for the MEC 2024 programming challenge.
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.
Role Team: Auth0 login, JWT-secured API, dashboard-to-API wiring
- React
- TypeScript
- Vite
- Ant Design
- Express
API Resume
My resume as a REST API: Postman-only, rate-limited, with a joke for anyone who POSTs.
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.
Role Solo
- Node.js
- Express
- MongoDB
- Mongoose
- Vercel
CarpoolX
Android app that matches riders headed the same way so they can share a taxi.
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.
Role Team of 4: repo lead, most of the Flask backend and auth, core screens
- React Native
- Python
- Flask
- Firebase
- Google Maps Platform
Ride Home
Mix subway sounds, chatter and lo-fi music into your own TTC ride-home ambience.
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.
Role Co-created with Quinn Ha; built the app and audio controls
- React
- Sass
- MUI
- AWS S3
- Netlify
Summary.io
Upload a lecture video and get an AI transcript to study from. Built at MacHacks 2.
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.
Role Team of 4: AssemblyAI integration, repo setup and write-up
- React
- AssemblyAI
- Node.js
- Express
Rest Day
A workout planner that schedules rest days, not just workouts. Built at 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.
Role Team of 2: Fitbit API integration, landing page, deploy
- React
- Fitbit Web API
- styled-components
- Node.js
- Figma
Tech specs
Under the hood.
- Languages
- TypeScript
- JavaScript
- Python
- Java
- C#
- SQL
- HTML/CSS
- Bash
- Frontend
- React
- React Native
- Next.js
- Vite
- MUI
- TanStack Query
- Backend & data
- Node.js
- Express
- .NET
- Flask
- Prisma
- PostgreSQL
- MongoDB
- Azure Cosmos DB
- Firebase
- DynamoDB
- Swagger
- AI & agents
- Model Context Protocol (MCP)
- Claude Agent SDK
- Claude Code
- Cursor
- Testing & automation
- Playwright
- Vitest
- Jest
- Selenium
- Infra & tooling
- Docker
- Git
- GitHub Actions
- GitLab CI
- Vercel
- AWS (Lambda, S3)
- Auth0
- Azure DevOps
- Education
B.Eng., Software Engineering (Co-op)
McMaster University, 2020–2025 · Dean's Honour List (2020–2023) · McMaster Honour Award (2020–2023) · Courses: System Design, Data Structures and Algorithms, OOP, Software Design, Databases
One more thing
Let’s build something.
Software Engineer at Zynga, based in Toronto, Canada.