ZAK CHEN

Professional Summary

Information security and assurance leader with 15 years of experience across software engineering, platform infrastructure, and data environments, including recent leadership in regulated fintech. Combines deep hands-on engineering roots with proven delivery of security governance, technology risk, third-party risk, and data control programs aligned to frameworks such as ISO 27001 and MAS TRM. Experienced in translating regulatory, operational, and technology risk into practical controls across engineering, operations, compliance, and executive stakeholders. Increasingly focused on AI governance, AI security assurance, and the safe adoption of emerging technologies in regulated and high-trust environments.

Core Strengths

Professional Experience

STRAITSX Singapore

Held dual leadership responsibilities across information security governance and platform engineering in a regulated fintech environment.

• Built and led the company-wide security governance program aligned to ISO 27001 and MAS TRM, establishing the control foundation for secure business and technology scaling.
• Designed and operationalized third-party risk and partner due diligence mechanisms, enabling more structured governance over external onboarding and ecosystem risk.
• Spearheaded new product risk assessment and technology risk advisory processes, helping executive stakeholders evaluate systemic and operational risks in business change.
• Directed implementation of data governance controls to support PDPC and DPTM-aligned requirements, bridging compliance intent with technical execution.
• Led platform engineering for high-availability fintech services, bringing practical engineering context into resilience, fraud-related platform design, and control prioritization.
• Worked across engineering, product, compliance, and leadership teams to translate business, regulatory, and technology risk into implementable operating controls.

BYTEDANCE Singapore

• Designed and implemented access control and data security mechanisms in a petabyte-scale data warehouse environment, strengthening governance over sensitive data usage and cross-border data flows.
• Embedded security and privacy controls into shared data infrastructure, deepening practical understanding of governance challenges in large-scale analytics and data-driven environments.
• Managed critical data pipelines and operational reliability concerns in high-scale systems, building experience relevant to secure and trustworthy AI/data ecosystems.

APPIER Singapore

• Led engineering delivery for data infrastructure supporting AI-driven user behavior prediction models.
• Architected and managed large-scale data pipelines across Python, Golang, Spark, and Airflow to support reliable analytics and machine learning workflows.
• Built strong practical understanding of the data lifecycle, platform dependencies, and operational controls underpinning machine learning systems.

EVIE.AI Singapore

• Led solution design and system architecture for an AI-driven scheduling assistant involving conversational context handling, workflow orchestration, and integration with external tools.
• Built early hands-on experience with assistant-style AI systems relevant to today’s agentic AI patterns, particularly in multi-step task execution and tool-connected automation.
• Gained early exposure to the control, security, and reliability challenges of systems acting on behalf of users across connected workflows.

Early Career Summary

Built early foundations across software engineering, cloud platforms, and technical leadership before moving into AI-enabled products, data platforms, and later security governance.