Tommy Ngai

About

Engineering lead/player-coach at Sam's Club who drove major React Native Member Desk Returns changes (including Vision Center insurance refund flows) by coordinating Product/UX, QA, and API teams and leading a 3-engineer squad. Also led an e-commerce mobile OAuth migration, evolving a login experience from vanilla JS to a React SPA as security requirements (MFA, reCAPTCHA) emerged, and improved production reliability via better request flagging and analytics/log instrumentation.

Key Strengths

• Led cross-functional React Native overhaul onboarding a new department (Vision Center) with API contract changes
• Player-coach leadership: led a team of 3 engineers; wrote tickets and provided documentation to unblock delivery
• Strong stakeholder management with Product/UX and API teams; improved UX flows while balancing feasibility
• Pragmatic technical decision-making under changing requirements (vanilla JS to React SPA as complexity grew)
• Security-first delivery: incorporated MFA and reCAPTCHA after security review; prioritized must-haves vs next version
• End-to-end incident ownership and root-cause analysis using logs to identify incorrect system path; drove tracking improvements
• Built feature-flag and deployment strategy with QA; created deployment playbook with regression testing and rollback steps
• Mentorship of junior engineers via 1:1s and onboarding support; increased trust and delegation of harder tasks

Experience

Education

Skills

Languages