Hey, I'm Samuel Thien

Samuel Thien — Welcome, have a look around.

Full stack engineer in Kuala Lumpur. I work on backend systems and the frontends people actually use, mostly with Go, TypeScript, and React. Currently on the Cloud Security team at Mercedes-Benz.

See my work → Resume

About

The short version

Full stack engineer in Kuala Lumpur, 4+ years into building web and mobile platforms. I work mostly in Golang, Node.js, and React. I'm comfortable writing backend services and just as happy getting the frontend details right. Currently on the Cloud Security team at Mercedes-Benz.

Studied Computer Science at Beihang University in Beijing, graduated with honors, and published research on adversarial machine learning. I speak English, Chinese, and Malay.

Golang TypeScript React React Native Node.js Docker Kubernetes PostgreSQL Redis AWS Kafka Flutter

Selected Work

Things I've shipped, and things I'm proud of.

2026

AccessOps with Durable Execution

This started as a simple access management prototype, but I mainly built it to explore durable execution and workflow patterns. It's SvelteKit on the frontend and Go + Postgres on the backend, with DBOS workflows handling things like approvals, provisioning, and access reviews — so they keep running even if the system restarts or crashes. Mostly just a sandbox for me to understand how to build systems where long-running processes don't easily break, and where changes are still traceable when things go wrong.

SvelteKit Go Postgres DBOS

Live

2025

YoTalent

Won the Mercedes-Benz Malaysia AI Hackathon with a great team. We speedran a talent ops platform: candidate matching, interview question generation, a question bank, and scheduling. Easily one of the most fun builds I’ve worked on.

React TypeScript Golang LLM Vector Database

Live

2024

ReplyHero

Co-founded an AI auto-reply platform for WhatsApp and Messenger. Built the landing page, web portal, and Android app — basically everything user-facing.

Flutter Next.js Sentry Posthog Firebase AWS

Live

2025

datetime-helper

Got tired of Googling Unix timestamp conversions mid-debug, so I built my own toolkit. Date math, timezone juggling, path queries, and natural language input. It turned into a fun tech exploration: Rust + WebAssembly under the hood, Astro for layout, Svelte for UI logic, and built-in skills so AI systems can query it directly.

Rust wasm Astro Svelte Cloudflare Pages Tailwind

Source Live

2026

AI PR Review

VS Code extension I built because I kept context-switching to review my own diffs. Generates PR-style comparisons between any two branches and kicks off a structured review in Copilot Chat.

TypeScript VS Code API Git

Source Live

+4 more from the archive

Schedule Hero

2024

Scheduling app where users and admins get completely different interfaces — my first real dive into role-based access control across a full-stack app.

React Node.js MongoDB Express

Code Demo

C-like Compiler

2023

Takes a C-like language and compiles it down to executable MIPS machine code. Lexer, parser, code generator — the full pipeline.

C++ MIPS Assembly

Code

School Management System

2022

Web app for managing class schedules where students, teachers, and admins each get their own tailored views and workflows.

React Node.js MySQL Express

Code

Mini MIPS CPU

2021

Five-stage pipelined CPU in Verilog. Fetch, decode, execute, memory, writeback, with hazard detection and forwarding baked in.

Verilog HDL MIPS ISA

Code

Talks

Sharing what I've been learning, one slide deck at a time.

May 2026

Durable Execution: An Introduction A first-principles walkthrough of durable execution: what breaks in distributed systems, why retries and queues aren't enough, and how workflow engines like DBOS, Temporal, and Restate approach the problem differently.

PDF →

Aug 2025

Latest Trend on Software Development Techniques A survey of emerging software development techniques shaping how teams build, test, and ship modern applications.

PDF →

Mar 2025

Evolutionary Architecture Topologies How architecture evolves incrementally through fitness functions, guided change, and topology patterns that let systems adapt without big-bang rewrites.

PDF →

Dec 2024

A Brief Introduction to RSA The math and intuition behind RSA encryption: how prime numbers, modular arithmetic, and trapdoor functions make public-key cryptography work.

PDF →

See all talks →

Experience

Security platforms, live streaming platforms, and startup product work.

Different contexts, same instinct: make things that work well and hold up under pressure.

Full Stack Engineer

Mercedes-Benz

2024 — Now

Building internal security tooling on the Cloud Security team. Mostly backend work in Go, but I also own frontend features end-to-end.

Design and ship workflows that internal security teams use daily
Build backend services and integrations in Go, with Vue on the frontend
Work across product, engineering, and security teams to scope and deliver features

Golang Vue Azure Redis Kubernetes Kafka

Software Engineer

Ola Chat

Apr — Aug 2024

Built high-performance microservices for a large-scale chat platform, optimizing backend systems across a broad technology stack.

Developed high-performance microservices using Golang and PHP for scalable messaging infrastructure
Leveraged MySQL, Redis, Elasticsearch, RPC, and NSQ to optimize backend workflows and data pipelines
Monitored and improved system health using Grafana, ensuring production reliability at scale

Golang PHP MySQL Redis Elasticsearch Grafana

Full Stack Developer

Life Line Lab

2021 — 2024

Built a marketplace, a logistics system, and a healthcare platform from scratch, each across web and mobile.

Wrote and ran Node.js and Golang microservices, including deployment and monitoring
Built web and mobile apps with React and React Native for several product lines
Implemented Attribute-based Access Control (ABAC) to scope data access per service
Set up CI/CD pipelines, automated tests, and static analysis tooling
Managed ArangoDB databases: initialization, backup, and complex reporting queries
Integrated AWS S3 and SES for file storage, PDF generation, and email

React React Native Node.js Golang ArangoDB AWS Docker

Research

Most of my time goes into building things, but I spent part of university researching why ML models break under adversarial conditions.

Sep 2022

RegWeight: Adversarial Training based on Dynamically-Adjusted Regularization Weights 2022 8th International Conference on Big Data and Information Analytics (BigDIA)

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Let's talk.

Got something in mind, or just want to say hello? Drop me a line.

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