Darren Poon - Software Development

Experience

Professional Experience

Product delivery, platform ownership, and technical leadership across fintech, SaaS, and mobile.

Sep 2020 - Jul 2026

Sep 2020 - Dec 2021Senior Software Developer

Jan 2022 - Jul 2026Lead Engineer

Hong Kong

Crypto.com

Lead Engineer

Contributed to and led backend services for Crypto.com's card platform, covering prepaid and credit card products, applications, payments, rewards, staking benefits, and lockups.

100M+ users on the broader Crypto.com platform; card services supported millions of card users.
High-traffic platform environment contributing to card backend services within a broader Crypto.com platform that handled 5+ million requests per minute during peak traffic.
Millions of Crypto.com Visa cards issued worldwide as card products expanded across the US, UK, EU, Australia, Middle East, Canada, Brazil, and Asia, including US credit card products.
Billions of dollars in monthly card transaction value processed through card payment flows and related backend services.
Led backend delivery for a distributed card engineering team across Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan, and Shenzhen, setting technical direction with product managers and senior management, mentoring teammates, and coordinating delivery as team capacity evolved.
P0/P1 incident response in card-related production incidents, working with the production support team on diagnosis, mitigation, and follow-up improvements.
Drove operational excellence as the platform scaled setting up alerting and monitoring, optimizing infrastructure and vendor costs, and tuning database performance.

RubyRuby on RailsClaudeKubernetesArgo CDPostgreSQL

Mar 2019 - Sep 2020Hong Kong

Welab Bank

Software Engineer

Contributed to building one of Hong Kong's virtual banks, working across backend platform capabilities, application security, and cloud delivery infrastructure.

ACH-to-FPS migration migrated Welend's loan disbursement system from ACH to FPS; the service handled billions of HKD annually.
Backend platform and application security through collaborative design, implementation, and extension of services, alongside security solutions that protected application data across dynamic cloud environments.
Automated CI/CD delivery using Kubernetes, Helm, and Argo CD across cloud environments.
Contributed to Spring microservices and Airflow workflows across design, development, and testing.

KubernetesHelmArgo CDVaultTerraformSpringAirflowPostgreSQL

Feb 2016 - Aug 2018Hong Kong

Branch8

Software Engineer

Built an all-in-one SaaS operations platform for marketplace sellers at Branch8, a company incubated and backed by Y Combinator as part of its S15 batch, managing more than 10 million products.

10M+ products managed across multiple marketplace integrations.
Technical leadership and peer guidance provided as the product and team grew.
Established a containerized Kubernetes platform and CI/CD pipeline using Google Cloud Build, Istanbul, and Helm.
Applied event sourcing across a Node.js, TypeScript, React, PostgreSQL, and Redis application stack.

Node.jsTypeScriptReactKubernetesPostgreSQLRedisEvent sourcing

Y Combinator company profile Y Combinator S15 launch post 36kr Startupbeat TechCrunch

Sep 2013 - Feb 2016Hong Kong

Premiumsoft Cybertech

Senior Software Developer

Developed mobile products and backend services used by a global Instagram community across Android, iOS, and web infrastructure.

More than one million downloads and a 4+ app-store rating for Grab for Instagram, built in Java and Objective-C.
More than 200,000 daily active users using the product.
19th Webby Awards Official Honoree for Best Use of Mobile Camera.
#1 app-store ranking in 13 countries for Grab for Instagram.
Automated mobile testing and reporting with Jenkins CI, SonarQube, Docker, Cucumber, and STF.
Developed an Instagram-like backend using LAMP.

AndroidiOSJavaObjective-CJenkinsSonarQubeDocker Cucumber STF

AppBrain listing

Earlier career

Earlier Experience

Jun 2013 - Aug 2013Hong Kong

Coffee Game

Game Developer

Developed Attack on Pirates, an open-source mobile puzzle game.

Independent work

Open-source Projects

Tools and products built outside full-time roles.

Fo.dex

Android application

An open-source Android application for indexing photos with less friction.

AndroidOpen source

Android Dockerfiles

Build tooling

A containerized Android emulator for running application builds and connected tests in Docker.

Example usage

docker run -it \
  -v /Path/to/your/android/project/:/workspace \
  dyhpoon/android-emulator-21 start-emulator \
  "./gradlew connectedAndroidTest"

DockerAndroidTesting

Attack on Pirates

Open-source game

A 2D mobile puzzle game powered by the Corona game engine.

Game developmentLuaOpen source

Skills

Technical Toolkit

Backend & data

Node.js
Java
Spring
Ruby on Rails
PostgreSQL
Redis
Airflow

Cloud & platform

Kubernetes
Docker
AWS
GCP
Azure
Terraform
Vault
Argo CD

Frontend & mobile

TypeScript
React
Vue
iOS
Android
HTML / CSS

Technical practice

Distributed systems
Event sourcing
CI/CD
Security
Observability
Technical leadership

Prior languages and technologies

Objective-C / PHP / Go / Swift / Python / C++ / Lua / Scheme / R / AngularJS / MongoDB / Kafka / Memcached / Gradle / Corona SDK

Credentials

AWS Certifications

Four AWS certifications earned in 2018. Listed as historical credentials; current certification status is not implied.

AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner2018
AWS Certified SysOps Administrator - Associate2018
AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate2018
AWS Certified Developer - Associate2018

Education

Sep 2012 - Jul 2013Hong Kong

Master of Science in Computer Science

City University of Hong Kong / Distinction

Sep 2008 - Jun 2012Ontario, Canada

Bachelor of Computer Science

University of Waterloo / Honours