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PHILIP CHEUNG

Principal Forward Deployed Engineer

Applied AI · LLM Systems in Production · Financial Services

school MSc Computer Science, AI & Data Science (Merit)
location_on London, United Kingdom
Philip Cheung
person

Professional Summary

I am the engineer who gets AI from a working demo into a business that has to live with it. As Principal Forward Deployed Engineer at a Swiss corporate finance advisory firm I run a five-person team and personally own the architecture, integrations and production accountability across four products, reporting weekly to a finance-led board. I build with AI coding agents under a three-gate review and evaluation process, which is how a small team ships integrations with Open Banking, Stripe, Firebase and twelve LLM providers, and I carry the pager when it breaks. Before engineering leadership I spent years on the client side: technical product management at Groupon and enterprise account management for a marketing-technology platform, working with government and multinational accounts across Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan and Macau. MSc Computer Science, AI and Data Science (Merit).

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Core Capabilities

rocket_launch Discovery to Production Ownership
  • Discovery to production, not demos
  • SLAs, audit trail and rollback paths
  • On-call; escalation point for incidents
  • Scoped, dated deliveries for the board
hub Integration Depth
  • Open Banking, Stripe, Firebase and Firestore
  • Cloudflare Pages, Functions, Workers, D1, R2
  • AWS and FIX connectivity
  • 12 LLM providers; Groq and Cerebras LPU inference
verified_user Governance Built In
  • Policy gates and evidence packs
  • Human-review escalation for high-risk cases
  • Per-call cost ledger
  • Audit ledger on every AI call
groups Adoption & Stakeholder Work
  • Thin working prototype plus live dashboard, not slide decks
  • Weekly board reporting
  • Board, investor and regulatory requirements into scoped deliveries
  • Client-side background: account management and technical product management
assignment_ind Deployment Leadership
  • Five-person team today
  • 8 engineers mentored at Pacific Cloud
  • Seniors ship v1, juniors iterate under review
  • Architecture reviews and AI/ML working practices
route How I Deliver (AI-assisted)
  • Claude Code, Codex CLI, Gemini CLI, Cursor
  • Eval harness and three review gates
  • Evaluation criteria defined before build
  • I review, debug and own what the agents produce
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Professional Experience

Principal Forward Deployed Engineer

Weidmann & Cie. AG
location_on London (Hybrid) calendar_today December 2024 - Present

Swiss corporate finance advisory firm building an applied-AI product portfolio: Qorinix (ultra-low-latency AI inference cloud), LaSpend (read-only AI money assistant over UK Open Banking), Fixxmi (Swiss consumer service marketplace) and an AI-native trading desk. I take each product from discovery to production with a five-person team and report weekly to a finance-led board.

  • Own end-to-end architecture and production accountability across all four products on AWS, Cloudflare (Pages, Functions, Workers, D1, R2) and Firebase; I am the escalation point for production incidents
  • Designed and shipped the Qorinix inference control plane with AI coding agents under a three-gate review and evaluation process: multi-tier model router across 12 providers (OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, DeepSeek, Qwen, Groq, Cerebras and others), streaming SSE, per-call cost ledger, usage-based billing and entitlements; targets sub-200ms time-to-first-token
  • Integrated LaSpend with regulated UK Open Banking data, Stripe and Cloudflare D1: subscription detection, waste scoring and assisted cancellation, designed read-only by policy with human approval for every user-triggered action and deterministic fallback when models fail
  • Delivered Fixxmi's AI lead matching (Next.js 15, Firebase Cloud Functions, Firestore europe-west6) across 12+ service categories in DE-CH/EN within GDPR and nFADP boundaries, with pay-per-lead Stripe credit packs
  • Built the governance loop applied to every AI call: policy check, evidence-pack retrieval, prompt registry, model routing, audit ledger and human-review escalation for high-risk cases
  • Ran a 12-provider inference benchmark (LLM Arena, live on my portfolio site) to ground model, latency and cost decisions; introduced token tiering and self-hosted models for non-latency-critical workloads to cut API spend
  • Translate board, investor and regulatory requirements into scoped, dated deliveries; win decisions with thin working prototypes and live dashboards rather than slide decks

AI Engineer & Technical Architect

Pacific Cloud Computing Ltd.
location_on Hong Kong & Remote UK calendar_today December 2021 - December 2024

Promoted internally from Senior Software Engineer to lead the firm's AI transformation across SaaS, analytics and market-intelligence products.

  • Built and operated a real-time ML inference service (feature pipelines, model serving, monitoring) for the firm's analytics products, with latency and accuracy gates defined before each release
  • Implemented enterprise retrieval (RAG) and market-intelligence NLP pipelines, including the evaluation methodology used to accept them into production
  • Directed the launch of three multi-tenant SaaS platforms; ran architecture reviews and established AI/ML working practices
  • Mentored an agile team of 8 engineers: seniors ship v1, juniors iterate under review
  • Led quantitative-markets decision support research: cross-asset anomaly detection and price forecasting

Senior Software Engineer

Pacific Cloud Computing Ltd.
location_on Hong Kong calendar_today January 2015 - November 2021
  • Built an enterprise document management SaaS with real-time collaboration for corporate clients
  • Built e-commerce platform capabilities including multi-currency payments; the SEO programme reached top search rankings
  • Pioneered the firm's blockchain product work: smart-contract products, NFT marketplace support and DeFi analytics

Senior Product Manager (Technical) / Web & Content Manager

Groupon.com
location_on Hong Kong calendar_today April 2013 - December 2014
  • Led platform modernisation from a monolithic to a service-oriented architecture as technical product manager, coordinating engineering delivery and business stakeholders
  • Introduced an A/B testing and SEO programme that delivered 150% traffic growth
  • Ran digital product operations and commercial prioritisation for the marketplace: merchandising, pricing structure and merchant coordination in an Agile environment

Senior Operations Manager

SoManyCall Telecom
location_on Hong Kong calendar_today March 2008 - April 2013
  • Oversaw strategic and operational delivery for custom software solutions in the telecoms sector, achieving a 25% annual growth rate
  • Led a multi-disciplinary team across the full project lifecycle
psychology

Core Technical Competencies

memory Machine Learning & Deep Learning
Python PyTorch Scikit-learn XGBoost TensorFlow Transformers Decision Trees LSTM/GRU Fine-tuning Feature Engineering
published_with_changes MLOps & Production ML
Automated Retraining Model Evaluation A/B Testing Canary Deployment Drift Monitoring Model Serving ONNX Triton Quantisation
api Backend, APIs & Microservices
FastAPI Microservices REST APIs Node.js TypeScript React Next.js Event-Driven Streaming / SSE
cloud Cloud, DevOps & Infrastructure
AWS GCP Cloudflare Docker Kubernetes Terraform CI/CD OpenTelemetry Multi-Region Failover
storage Data Pipelines & Storage
PostgreSQL Redis TimescaleDB pgvector Firestore Cloudflare D1 / R2 Batch Pipelines Real-Time Pipelines
smart_toy Generative AI & LLM Systems
RAG LLM Orchestration LangChain Multi-Provider Routing Prompt Registry Guardrails Function Calling Eval Harness
terminal AI-Assisted Engineering
Claude Code Codex CLI Gemini CLI Cursor Eval Harness Three Review Gates
school

Education

psychology
MSc Computer Science, AI & Data Science
University of Wolverhampton, UK
2023 - 2025 | Grade: Merit
Dissertation: LLM-Augmented High-Frequency Trading Strategy Development (AI-assisted three-gate workflow; 85% less strategy development time)
Modules: Deep Machine Learning, Intelligent Agents, Data Science & Mining, Applying AI, Cloud Computing, Research Methods
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Bachelor of Business Administration
Hong Kong University of Science & Technology
1995
Marketing with Information Systems minor
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Selected Deployments

Qorinix inference control plane
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Qorinix Inference Control Planeperson Designed and shipped with AI agents under my review

Problem: the board wanted "instant" AI responses for real-time agents, voice and trading alerts, inside a latency budget, provider cost and failover constraints.
Shipped: multi-tier router across 12 providers, streaming SSE, per-call cost ledger, usage-based billing and entitlements.
Outcome: targets sub-200ms TTFT (p50), measured as TTFT p50/p95 per provider in the LLM Arena benchmark; token tiering cut API spend for non-latency-critical work.

LaSpend Open Banking money assistant
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LaSpend, Open Banking Assistantperson Designed and shipped with AI agents under my review

Problem: read-only AI money assistant over FCA-regulated Open Banking data; PII minimisation, never moving money.
Shipped: Open Banking API, Stripe, Cloudflare Pages + Functions + D1; human approval for every user-triggered action, deterministic fallback, verified action receipts.
Outcome: live in production; measured by recurring-spend detection precision and cancellation completion rate.

Fixxmi AI lead matching
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Fixxmi, AI Lead Matchingperson Designed and shipped with AI agents under my review

Problem: Swiss consumer marketplace needed AI lead matching across 12+ categories in DE-CH/EN under GDPR and nFADP, with Firestore europe-west6 residency.
Shipped: Next.js 15, Firebase Cloud Functions, Firestore, pay-per-lead Stripe credit packs.
Outcome: live; measured by match acceptance rate.

Audit-grade AI governance loop
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Audit-Grade Governance Loopperson Built

Problem: every AI call across four products must be policy-checked, costed and auditable, with a human path for high-risk cases.
Shipped: policy check, evidence-pack retrieval, prompt registry, model routing, action runtime, audit ledger, human-review escalation, policy feedback.
Outcome: applied to every AI call; measured by audit completeness and escalation rate.

Portfolio assistant on personal site
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Portfolio Assistant, personal siteperson Built

Problem: a live, inspectable proof of hands-on work: a chatbot that must answer fast, stay inside staged daily budgets and hold a hardened system prompt.
Shipped: Next.js edge runtime on Cloudflare Pages; five-provider cascade (Groq, Cerebras, Gemini, DeepSeek, OpenRouter) with timeouts and fallback; signed-cookie rate limiting.
Outcome: live on my portfolio site; measured by fallback rate and p95 response time.

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Selected Certifications

cloud
MLOps Specialization
Google Cloud | 2024
auto_awesome
Gemini Certified Educator
Google | 2025-2028
terminal
CS50x Computer Science
Harvard | 2024
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SFC Licensing Exams (Papers 1/7/8/12)
HKSI, Hong Kong | 2021
Open to Principal Forward Deployed, Applied AI and AI Solutions Engineering roles. Full UK right to work | Based near London | Hybrid or remote UK | Languages: English, Cantonese, Mandarin
folder_shared Portfolio on request