About
The person behind Opal Research.
Shawn Wang
Serial Founder & CTO · Ex-AWS · Applied ML & Quantitative Trading
In the world of AI, there are people who can imagine what to build and people who can actually build it. I’ve spent my career refusing to choose between the two.
As a solo technical founder at IntelliLead, I decided what to build, designed it, wrote it, and priced it — shipping an AI-powered SaaS to paying users in two weeks and winning first place at Taiwan’s Dragon’s Chamber pitching competition. As a solutions architect and sales engineer at Nextlink, I turned enterprise problems into solutions and delivered them end to end, leading Cathay Group’s (Taiwan’s largest financial institution) digital modernization. Underneath all of it is the software craft I built as an engineer at AWS, where I earned early promotion by owning greenfield decisions from API design through production on Amazon Connect and Aurora Global Database.
Most recently I took half a year off the clock to scratch a long-standing itch: learning quantitative finance and applied ML from the ground up. I went deep on the parts of ML most engineers never touch — rigorous backtesting and walk-forward validation, position sizing, careful labeling and feature design, and the statistics of telling signal from noise — built a live systematic trading system end to end, and let it loose. It now runs autonomously on AWS. It started as scratching an itch; it became the most fun I’d had building in years.
Who I Am
Curious by default. Genuine by nature.
At heart I’m an enthusiast — intellectually curious, drawn to hard questions, and happiest when I can chase one down to a real answer on my own. I like asking the question everyone skipped, and I trust myself to go find out.
I also care a lot about people. I try to be genuine, compassionate, and high-integrity in how I work, and I get real energy from inspiring others and uplifting people around me. The best teams I’ve been on combined sharp problems with good humans — that’s the kind of team I want to build and join.
Get in touch
Currently open to roles where sharp people solve hard problems and craft matters.
I’m open to senior software, applied-ML, and quantitative engineering roles — in Singapore or remote. If you’re building a team that values end-to-end ownership and genuinely good people, I’d love to hear from you.
hi.im.shawn.wang@gmail.com