Head of Tech, Revenue Monster | Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
Hi, I am Rex!
I like solving real problems for real businesses, and building the tech that makes it happen.
01 — About
Who I am
I work at the intersection of engineering, security, and regulation — building the infrastructure a payments business needs to be trusted with real money, and the organization needed to keep building it.
I started as a machine learning engineer, building fraud and tamper-detection systems for eKYC pipelines. That grounding in applied ML still shapes how I approach engineering today: instrument everything, distrust intuition, and let the data settle the argument.
8 years in regulated FinTech later, I lead a 20-person engineering organization across six business entities, own PCI DSS Level 1 compliance, and work directly with regulators, banks, and card networks to keep platforms both fast and trustworthy for our customers.
02 — How I work
A few operating principles
01
Question before you build
Every requirement gets interrogated before a line of code does. Critical thinking comes first, convention second — challenging the "normal" way is usually how the real problem surfaces.
02
Trust the data over the story
A 95% accuracy score means nothing until you've checked how the other 5% fails. My ML background means I default to evidence over intuition.
03
Good technology starts with the business case
Always understand the business point of view first — before jumping into code. The best architecture is the one that actually moves the business, not just the one that's technically elegant.
04
Start small, scale deliberately
Most systems don't need the biggest server in the fleet. Prove the bottleneck before you provision for it.
03 — Perspectives
Recent writing
Aug 2026
Meat Proxies, Vibe Coding, and Building Teams That Still Think
A piece about being a meat proxy inspired me to think about vibe coding on my own team — and how to build a culture where people use AI without outsourcing their judgment.
Apr 2025
When Webhooks Go Missing: A DNS Mystery in the Cloud
A deep dive into a mysterious webhook delivery issue affecting one merchant in our payment gateway, which turned out to be a DNS resolution problem between Alibaba Cloud and Bluehost. Here's what we discovered, how we handled it, and what you should watch out for.
Sep 2024
Cloud Cost Optimization - Kubernetes Focused
A hands-on guide to optimizing your cloud infrastructure costs, with a special emphasis on Kubernetes.
Building something in payments or FinTech?
Always happy to talk infrastructure, compliance, or team building over a call.
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