Forward Deployed AI & Automation Engineer
Charlie Tang Hoong
I turn ambiguous business problems into production-ready AI, automation and software systems.
Fifteen years, from Selangor, Malaysia — and most of that work starts the same way: a system somebody else built, no documentation, and a business that cannot stop while it is fixed.
2 of 3 told to stop
AI feasibility studies in three unrelated domains. Two I advised against on capital cost; the third was built.
Billions of ad impressions
Every month, on the AdTech platform I worked on — tens of thousands of requests a second, and sub-100 ms p95 on the backend paths I rebuilt.
15+ pipelines
Price monitoring, lead generation and market intelligence — for SME customers who needed a price list watched, not a platform built.
15+ years
Four employers, one Singapore contract, two ventures and independent delivery — enterprise operations teams and two-person SMEs alike.
Two of those three AI proposals did not go ahead, and that is the point: the customer got a real number early enough to say no cheaply.
Selected Work
View all fiveFive selected engagements, each written the same way: what the customer was trying to do, what was unclear, what I decided, what I built or advised, and what outcome followed.
Case 01
Production
Building against a system we did not own
A multi-role booking and ordering platform went live against an enterprise client's legacy ERP, with the API contract negotiated directly with the client's own engineers and every scope change signed off before it reached engineering.
Case 02
Production — NDA-limited
Taking the typing out of a document workflow that could not go offline
A hybrid OCR and LLM pipeline substantially reduced the manual data entry in a high-volume shipping-document workflow, inside an operation whose source systems had no API and could not be replaced.
Case 04
Feasibility assessment only · Paid build — closed beta
Three AI proposals, and the two I advised against
Three AI feasibility engagements in three unrelated domains, each turned into a solution design with a costed build estimate: two were correctly declined on capital cost, and the third was built.
How I Work
The full methodThe same seven steps whether the customer is an enterprise operations team or a two-person SME. The order matters more than the tooling: most delivery failures I have seen were decided before any code was written.
01
Discover
Sit with the people doing the work today and document the current process as it really runs, not as the org chart describes it.
02
Define
Draw the proposed flow, walk the stakeholder through it, and get written confirmation before engineering starts.
03
Design
Decide what to buy and what to build before deciding how to build it. Be honest about which constraints are real.
04
Build
Take the complex, contract-defining work personally; delegate the straightforward surface.
05
Deploy
Assume the environment is not mine to change. Integrate without invading, and always leave a path for a person to take over mid-run.
06
Measure
Decide up front what “working” means and how it will be observed — and for AI systems, an evaluation set rather than an impression.
07
Iterate
Ship the phase, keep the second phase’s prerequisites visible, and let what production reveals reorder the backlog.
What I Bring
What I bring, in fullGrouped by what it does for a business. The tools are underneath each one, in that order on purpose.
Customer Discovery & Solution Framing
Turning an incomplete brief into a defined scope with a costed estimate and an agreed definition of done — working directly with the people who own the problem.
Applied AI & Workflow Automation
AI systems that have to run inside a real operation: document extraction with a human review step, support assistants with escalation to a person, and RPA across finance and logistics.
Solution Architecture & Enterprise Integration
Connecting systems that were never designed to be connected — a client’s legacy ERP, source systems with no API at all, and the manual steps in between.
Production Engineering & Reliability
Owning a system past its release. Long-running jobs that resume from where they stopped. Failures that surface while a human can still fall back to the manual process.
Technical Delivery & Stakeholder Alignment
Leading delivery and technical decisions rather than headcount: architecture and technology-selection calls, code-review practice, and mentoring through the actual blocker.
Let’s talk
Forward Deployed Engineer · Forward Deployed AI Engineer · Applied AI Engineer · Solutions Engineer · Customer Engineer · AI Solutions Architect · Technical Delivery Lead
Based in Selangor, Malaysia. Open to client-site work in the Klang Valley, including long-term placement, and to Singapore-based and regional APAC projects. Malaysian citizen, available to relocate to Singapore — employer-sponsored work authorisation will be required.