Principal Engineer. Former CTO.
20+ years building and scaling software platforms: cloud accounting, ad tech and fintech media. I work on hard architecture problems and on the teams that have to live with them.
I'm a Principal Engineer at Atlassian in Melbourne. Before that I was CTO of Livewire Markets and Market Index, and I spent the years before that building products at MYOB, Unlockd and SEEK.
The best way to reach me is email: hello at lawrencesong dot com.
Experience
Principal Engineer, Atlassian
Chief Technology Officer, Livewire Markets and Market Index
Hands-on CTO working with the executive team on OKRs, shared services and a unified design system. Moved sites to server-side rendering with Nuxt and CDN caching, taking Lighthouse scores from 30 to 90. Built a cross-brand design system in Storybook. Introduced infrastructure-as-code on AWS CDK with auto-scaling, cutting monthly operating costs by 50%. After an acquisition, consolidated duplicated tech stacks into shared services.
Senior Consultant, SEEK
Raised release velocity to multiple safe deploys a day with continuous delivery. Migrated a legacy monolith to Elasticsearch and AWS serverless services, and moved the backend of a key product to GraphQL and microservices. Mentored junior and graduate engineers.
Engineering Director, Unlockd
Led engineering for a mobile advertising platform that rewarded users for viewing ads on their lockscreens. Processed 700M+ events a day. Cut Android build time by 70% with a micro-frontend architecture. Supported expansion into the US, UK and Asia with telco partners.
Platform Architect, MYOB
Led the design of MYOB's first cloud accounting products. Built Cashbook from scratch in six months, a product projected to bring in $10M a year. Introduced React, a shared design system and micro-frontends to break up a large monolith. Managed and mentored ten engineers through a move to Agile, continuous delivery and DevOps.
Lead Consultant, ThoughtWorks
Agile transformation and delivery for Macquarie, Suncorp, AXA, CGU, Sensis and Lonely Planet. Recovered projects that had been written off.