👋 Hey, I'm Samuel Thien

I build things that scale, and stay secure

Full stack engineer with a backend spine and a product eye. I build secure, high-performance systems with Go, TypeScript, and React, then obsess over the details that make them feel clear and alive.

Building Since

2021

Current Focus

Backend, Security, Product

View Projects → Download Resume

About

That's me →

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, touching everything from high-performance microservices to polished, pixel-level frontends. 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 along the way. 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

Champion of the Mercedes-Benz Malaysia AI Hackathon with an amazing team. We speedran building a talent ops platform with AI-powered candidate matching, intelligent interview question generation, a dedicated question bank, and interview 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, and path queries as a first-class feature. It also supports natural language queries. This turned into a fun tech exploration: Rust + WebAssembly under the hood, Astro for layout, and Svelte for UI logic — with built-in agent-friendly 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

Experience

Roles across enterprise security, startup backend, and full-stack product delivery.

Roles across enterprise security, startup backend, and full-stack product delivery. Different contexts, same approach: build things that are useful, fast, and resilient.

Building since 2021

2024 — Now

Full Stack Engineer

Mercedes-Benz

Building secure internal platforms on the Cloud Security team, with a strong backend foundation and product-minded frontend delivery.

Design and ship security-facing workflows for internal users
Build backend services and integrations with reliability in mind
Collaborate across product, engineering, and security stakeholders

Golang Vue Azure Redis Kubernetes Kafka

Apr — Aug 2024

Software Engineer

Ola Chat

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

2021 — 2024

Full Stack Developer

Life Line Lab

Built multiple platforms from scratch — including a marketplace, logistics management system, and healthcare platform — across web and mobile.

Developed and deployed Node.js and Golang microservices end-to-end, from implementation to monitoring
Built web and mobile apps using React and React Native across multiple product lines
Implemented Attribute-based Access Control (ABAC) for fine-grained data access across services
Set up CI/CD pipelines, automated testing workflows, and static code analysis tooling
Managed ArangoDB databases including initialization, backup, and complex reporting queries
Integrated with AWS S3 and SES for file management, PDF generation, and email delivery

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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something together.

Got a project, a question, or a terrible pun? I'm all ears. Don't be a stranger.

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