Entrepreneur·Artist·Software Engineer
Melbourne → Sydney → San Francisco
Hi there, my name is Tim Wu. I'm an artist and engineer and I love building beautiful products. I'm skilled across the stack, from interface design and user experience right through to the machinery under the hood. Whether it's building components in Figma, writing code, prompting AI, or working deep in the command line: it all feels natural to me. Two decades. Ten companies. Two founded, one acquired. Two patents. Most of it working directly with founders, or being one myself.
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“Tim is, without a doubt, one of the smartest engineers I've ever worked with. His ability to break down complex problems and devise clean solutions, all while understanding the bigger picture, still blows me away. His deep understanding of engineering fundamentals and keen awareness of user needs make him an exceptional asset to any team. Any team would be lucky to have Tim on board, and I wholeheartedly recommend him. But more importantly, I know someday, he'll build something amazing, that is super important to the world. I'm rooting for Tim!”
“Tim was the fourth engineer to join RocketReach, and I had the pleasure of working closely with him for several years. As our company was growing quickly Tim was willing and eager to wear many hats, always ready to help out wherever he was needed. He was a key member of our interview team and also played a vital role in on-boarding and mentoring new hires.
One of Tim's standout contributions to the company was his role as the technical lead on building our Chrome Extension. That product continues to be a significant part of our offering and boasts over 300,000 WAU. Tim used this project as an opportunity to drive innovation within the company, creating many new developer tools that have improved productivity across all our projects since then. He was passionate about developer experience and pioneered the use of Svelte for several new products at RocketReach, enhancing our core offering, the search application. Tim also excelled in disseminating best practices to our front-end engineers, helping us improve our test posture and code quality.
I am impressed by Tim's ability to work up and down the stack and collaborate effectively across teams. As an early engineer at RocketReach, Tim played a significant role in defining our culture of collaboration. I wholeheartedly recommend Tim for any company seeking a well-rounded software engineer, and I hope to have the opportunity to work with him again!”
“Tim is an incredibly thoughtful and talented engineer who holds a high bar for his craft. He is forward-thinking in his approach to solving complex engineering challenges and consistently delivers high quality solutions. Tim was integral in shaping the evolution of RocketReach's frontend technology stack and was an active partner to his peers and the leadership team in the decision making process.
In addition to his strong engineering capabilities, Tim is an excellent teammate. He frequently lends his time to mentor, partner on solutions, and build the culture of his teams. I would highly recommend Tim for any team seeking a collaborative software engineer who is passionate about building elegant and customer-focused products.”
“Tim is a brilliant engineer and an even better colleague. I had the pleasure of working with Tim for nearly two years at RocketReach. When I first started, Tim was instrumental in helping me gain my footing in a product and codebase that were new to me. He continued to be an invaluable resource to me and the entire company throughout the rest of our time together. I have no doubt that Tim would be an incredible addition to any engineering team.”
“Tim has been an amazing mentor, coworker, teammate, and friend during our time working together! He is smart, easy-going, and a problem-solver. He is a great asset to whatever company he is working with, and I look forward to seeing him continue to do great things!”
“I've had the pleasure of working closely with Tim over the past year, witnessing firsthand his exceptional skills as a software developer.
Tim is also remarkably talented in design, problem-solving, leadership, and fostering strong interpersonal relationships. He excels in collaborative programming, project planning, liaising between design and development teams, conducting thorough testing, and writing detailed documentation.
Tim's tireless work ethic and commitment to supporting his teammates is unparalleled, and his mentorship has been instrumental in my professional growth, offering actionable and specific advice that has driven my career forward.
Any team would find immense value in having Tim, given his ability to elevate both projects and people with his unique blend of skills and dedication.”
“Tim is not only one of the most impressive frontend experts I've worked with, but also an amazing full-stack engineer and a very collaborative problem solver. He brings a wealth of expertise in development and combine that with technical leadership, mentorship and collaboration, the impact is felt across the whole team. His ability to navigate complex technical challenges across the stack while maintaining a user-centric approach and UI expertise has been incredibly impressive. On top of executing product and technical goals, he also always strives to push the development culture and best practices, allowing all of us to move faster and learn more.
I've had the privilege of working closely with Tim. He is always there to huddle and help myself and others out or pair, while also consistently delivering high-quality work that goes above and beyond to ensure the success of our projects and features. Specifically, some very meaty difficult projects including leading our Browser Extension Development from the ground up and playing a significant role in our frontend legacy and migration project, being an expert in javascript and frontend development. Tim's added passion for innovation and staying up-to-date with industry trends makes him a standout professional as well, pushing us to try new things and make the developer experience better while also not sacrificing the user experience and design principles or product deliverables.
It's a pleasure to work alongside him, and I have no doubt that he will continue to excel in any team or project he undertakes.”
“I worked with Tim as the back-end dev on the Browser Plugin project he was building. He consistently came up with good solutions for problems, was thinking ahead about performance issues we would run into, and had solutions for saving us money by offloading work to edge services.
He also had good plans and designs for the project and how it integrated into our bigger system.”
“I had the pleasure of working with Tim at RocketReach for almost two years. During our time together, Tim showed immense product ownership and deep technical skill. He is a fantastic team player who is held in high regard by his peers and across all functions of the business. I also feel lucky to have gotten to know Tim personally. He is genuinely a great person and I respect him very much. I highly recommend Tim and am more than happy to speak with anyone looking to hire him to share the wonderful experiences I had with him.”
“Tim excels at making great interfaces, and he has been my go to for projects that involve UI reworking or changes to interactions. He has an excellent knack for interaction flourishes that go beyond simply being usable to the point of being delightful. Tim also keeps up with new tools and frameworks, and has frequently informed me of things I haven't heard about yet.
Tim has been a crucial part of my team since he joined us, and I know he'll be as valuable to any other team that he joins.”
“Tim single-handedly took much of our web application into the modern age of web design. He has a knack for creating beautiful usable interfaces, and is excellent at working with designers to help them level up the design a notch before he executes it to perfection.”
“It was a pleasure working with Tim whom I consider as one of the most committed Technology professionals. He is great with innovation in technology and I have never seen him short of ideas whenever faced with challenging projects. He is somebody who is pro-active about the latest trends in his technology domain and willing to learn.”
“Tim and I were members of the Groupon APAC technology leadership team together.
During this time Tim was a skilled engineer and leader. He was organised and diligent and always took time to share his knowledge with his direct reports and other teams within the region.
Whilst there were many success stories one that immediately comes to mind was Tim's investigation, implementation and training of regional on-call and alerting infrastructure.
Working together with Tim was a pleasure and a highlight of my time at Groupon. I would like to work directly with Tim again some day.”
“Tim is a very dedicated individual and takes very strong ownership over the apps and projects we built. I have had the great privilege of working alongside Tim and building some of the most exciting projects together. He takes great precaution over his work and strives to deliver only the best. Would totally 10/10 work with Tim again, given the opportunity!”
“Tim was one of the best bosses I've ever had. He mentored me, encouraged me to do more with my career and supported the work that I did and the projects I contributed to. Tim has a passion for technology that inspires others. He always encouraged team bonding and promoted our teams endeavours with a high level of professionalism.”
“Tim is honest, hardworking and a pleasure to deal with. He has a good technical knowledge and communicates well even when working remotely. I would recommend him for web development positions.”
“In the time that I worked with Tim Wu I found that his positive attitude, thoughtfulness of others, attention to detail, and his constant strive for cheerful professionalism were not only his most prominent traits, but were well suited to the IT support roles that he was nursing at the time. I am very pleased to have worked with Tim and to have witnessed his growth into the professional world.”
“Tim is a pleasure to work with. He displays an unbelievable level of attention to detail, and always sets very high bars for himself and all around him. His poise and composure under pressure certainly made an impact with me, as it helped to ensure tasks were completed at only the highest standard despite looming deadlines. I wouldn't hesitate to recommend Tim!
Best qualities: attention to detail; great problem solver, always has a clear picture; composure under pressure.”
“We hired Tim for a 3 week contract at Carsales to complete a single project. He ended up staying for much longer working on many different areas not just in Quality Assurance. He was great to have around on the team. Tim is friendly, polite, smart and gets things done with little fuss. He is also particular about the quality of his work and makes sure it is of a high standard.”
amit s.
Founder @ RocketReach
I found the intersection of art and technology early. Born in China, raised in Australia, I spent my childhood drawing, painting and building 3D models, and by 2006 my artwork was exhibited at the Melbourne Arts Centre. Around the same time I was tinkering with computers and building websites for my school, which felt like the perfect marriage of the two. That side gig running my high school’s website turned into paid work through college.
After earning a scholarship for a Business IT degree I started a company, Crowdmass, acquired by Groupon in 2011. That led to a leadership role heading up technology for Groupon Australia and New Zealand, and later a global role overseeing tech operations across Asia Pacific for Groupon’s international deals platform. Frequent trips to the US planted the idea of building something new in the Bay Area, and in 2014 I made the move, landing softly through Breadcrumb, a subsidiary of Groupon at the time. When Breadcrumb was sold in 2016 I left to pursue my own startup full time with a co-founder who I helped secure over a million dollars in funding, a chapter that ran until the pandemic disrupted funding and partnerships at the end of 2020.
I spent nearly four years at RocketReach as a senior full-stack engineer, where I helped shape company culture and values early on while working across the stack, from Dockerising development environments to leading the migration from AngularJS to Svelte and Tailwind. I rebuilt the browser extension that over 300,000 people were using weekly to access the platform directly within the Chrome browser, and helped introduce the company’s first CI pipeline with Jenkins before the move to GitHub Actions.
Since 2024 I have been a staff full-stack engineer at Monterra, building software and AI for the electrical contractors expanding EV charging and modernising the systems the rest of it runs on. The platform carries a project from site layout through AI equipment auto-spec and single line diagrams into estimating, quoting and RFQs, so teams can design and win work orders of magnitude faster. I never studied computer science formally; everything from design instincts to backend architecture has been self-taught along the way, which is exactly the range I bring to a team today.
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People I’ve worked with. Things we accomplished. Work I’m proud of.
Press to swap the company name for the job title.
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2024 to Today
San Francisco · Remote
Software and AI for the electrical contractors and project teams designing EV charging and electrical modernisation work. A site layout goes in; auto-specified equipment and a single-line diagram come out. The kind of tool where the interface and technology behind it have to be right or the drawing and results are wrong.
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2020 to 2024
San Francisco · Remote
Built the browser extension, which supports over 300,000 weekly active users, and the remote configuration service behind it, answering more than two million requests a week. I drove the AngularJS to Svelte and Tailwind migration. Jenkins CI, Dockerised onboarding, hiring and mentoring.
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2012 to 2020
San Francisco Bay Area
Led the technical and design teams to build out the video platform and technology I invented. The video graph underneath it became two patents.
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2011 to 2016
Greater Sydney San Francisco Bay Area
Led the Australian and New Zealand technology teams. Worked on the Groupon Delivery launch in July 2011, which handled address collection for 32,000+ Australian and 5,000+ New Zealand addresses, and built the payment and invoice workflow processing over 50,000 invoices a week. The team voted me the inaugural leadership peer award that year. The move to the US came through Breadcrumb, the Groupon point of sale business, where I designed and built out the customer facing reporting system, its graphs and charting, and the animated invoice signatures, through to its sale in 2016.
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2010 to 2011
Acquired 2011
A group-buying destination bringing consumers local discounts on things to see, eat and do. I founded it with a couple of friends, then Groupon acquired it in 2011.
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Other things that have kept me busy.
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One on the structure beneath the video, the other on how it’s surfaced.
Video items indexed for rapid retrieval, particularly over mobile networks. The invention underneath the Tagflix platform powering the video products and services ecosystem: the video graph.
A design patent for the interface over the video graph: a large set of products and services surfaced at any single point in a video, navigable at a glance, and drawn so the clusters of items across an entire runtime are easy to pick out.