Sheet 01 · Toronto, Canada · Scale 1:4317
LucasChen
Software engineer building AI tooling and ad tech at Zynga.
● Experience
Elevation profile
01 May 2025 – Present
Software Engineer · Zynga
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.
Toronto, ON
02 May 2023 – Jun 2024
Full 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.
03 Sep 2022 – Apr 2023
Teaching Assistant · McMaster University
- 1P13 Integrated Engineering Project (Sep–Dec 2022).
- 2GA3 Computer Architecture (Jan–Apr 2023).
Hamilton, ON
04 May 2022 – Aug 2022
Software 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%.
05 Oct 2021 – 2022
AI Research Member · McMaster Artificial Intelligence Society
- 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.
Hamilton, ON
06 Jun 2021 – Sep 2021
Software 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%.
▲ Field notes
Now: Zynga, AdTech
Recent work, kept high-level.
01
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.
02
LiveOps agent
2–3 h~20 minTime to complete one LiveOps workflow
I worked on an AI LiveOps agent that cut a workflow from 2–3 hours to about 20 minutes.
03
High-value ads
I designed and led a project that helps games identify high-value ads.
◆ Sites surveyed
Selected work
10 projects, newest first.
SITE 01EL. 2026tool
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.
- 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.
Role Solo: spec, design and CLI (in progress)
- TypeScript
- Node.js
- JSON Schema (Ajv)
- Commander
- YAML
SITE 02EL. 2026product
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.
- 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.
Role Solo, full-stack (2023 version with help from Douglas Chen)
- TypeScript
- Playwright
- React
- Express
- PostgreSQL
- Auth0
- Docker
Field report (case study) →GitHub (2023 version) ↗
With Douglas Chen
SITE 03EL. 2024product
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.
- 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).
Role Team of 5: app shell, Auth0 login, meal-planning flow, deploy
- React
- Vite
- MUI
- Auth0
- Chart.js
- Vercel
Field report (case study) →Live demo ↗
With Mohammad Mohsin Khan, Wajdan Faheem, Jasmine Sun-Hu, Hammad
SITE 04EL. 2024product
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.
- 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.
Role Solo, front-end
- React
- Vite
- Leaflet
- React Router
- Vercel
SITE 05EL. 2024hackathon
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.
- 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.
Role Team: Auth0 login, JWT-secured API, dashboard-to-API wiring
- React
- TypeScript
- Vite
- Ant Design
- Express
- Auth0
- Firebase
With Willie Pai, Mohammad Mohsin Khan
SITE 06EL. 2023experiment
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.
- 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.
Role Solo
- Node.js
- Express
- MongoDB
- Mongoose
- Vercel
SITE 07EL. 2023product
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.
- 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).
Role Team of 4: repo lead, most of the Flask backend and auth, core screens
- React Native
- Python
- Flask
- Firebase
- Google Maps Platform
Field report (case study) →GitHub ↗
With Henushan Bala, Rafeed Iqbal, Allison Cook
SITE 08EL. 2022experiment
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.
- 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.
Role Co-created with Quinn Ha; built the app and audio controls
- React
- Sass
- MUI
- AWS S3
- Netlify
With Quinn Ha
SITE 09EL. 2022hackathon
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.
- 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).
Role Team of 4: AssemblyAI integration, repo setup and write-up
- React
- AssemblyAI
- Node.js
- Express
With Douglas Chen, Aditya Bhadauriya, Fady Morcos
SITE 10EL. 2022hackathon
Rest Day
A workout planner that schedules rest days, not just workouts. Built at DeltaHacks 8.
★ 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.
Role Team of 2: Fitbit API integration, landing page, deploy
- React
- Fitbit Web API
- styled-components
- Node.js
- Figma
Field report (case study) →Devpost ↗GitHub ↗
With Willie Pai
✚ Kit list
What’s in the pack
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
Skills
- 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
■ Base camp