Chainat
Wongtapan
I build teams, architect systems, and write code instrument AI automation to supercharge software development team in a new modern world.
From early product to scaled platform — 17+ years of hands-on engineering leadership. Strong passion for moderen agentic engineering and ready to lead the next generation of AI-powered software development team.
Engineer at heart,
leader by growth.
I'm a software engineer turned CTO with 17+ years of hands-on experience building products and the teams behind them. I've grown engineering organisations from the ground up, shipped AI-powered features, and stayed close to the code throughout.
At Before You Buy, I joined as the first in-house engineer and scaled the team to 15 across Sydney and Cebu — growing report distribution by 700% and contributing to $13M in annual revenue.
I care about clean architecture, pragmatic decisions, and engineers who are set up to do their best work. I'm equally comfortable in a whiteboard architecture session, a sprint retro, or a pull request review.
Numbers that matter.
How I contribute.
Lead & Grow Teams
Hiring, onboarding, squad structures, retention. I've built distributed teams and kept them together through growth and downturns.
Build & Architect
Microservices, serverless, AWS, GraphQL federation, REST APIs. Systems designed to scale and evolve — not just to ship.
Ship AI/ML Products
Hands-on with ML prediction engines, LLM integration, outbound AI phone assistants, and MCP servers — actual delivery, not just strategy.
Make the Hard Calls
Build vs. buy, tech debt vs. velocity, platform vs. features. I partner with founders to make technology decisions that stick.
What I've built.
Before You Buy
2020 – PresentAustralia's leading digital property due diligence platform
- Joined as first in-house engineer, promoted to CTO within 14 months
- Architected 36-microservice platform on AWS with GraphQL federation
- Built REST API integration with Domain & REA handling 2.5M+ daily requests
- Delivered in-house ML prediction algorithm (R&D grant backed)
- Deployed outbound AI phone assistant saving 5 staff-hours/day
- Lead/built MCP server powering AI chat systems
- Led PoC on LLM-based data extraction for Valocity/PropTrack and Data as a Service offering
- Championed Claude Code, Cursor, and automated PR review across the team
- Lead/integrated CoreLogic API system for listing info & enhancing business operations with data-driven insights
CuriousThing
2019 – 2020AI voice assistant startup — large-scale recruitment automation
- Built and launched a SaaS platform for AI-powered phone interviews across multiple international markets
- Led a team of seven engineers through full technical delivery
- Early hands-on work with conversational AI and voice automation at scale (pre-ChatGPT)
Earlier Career
2007 – 2019Senior engineering roles across AI, insurance, solar, and digital agencies
- Flamingo Ventures— Senior engineer on an AI-powered insurance chat platform, deployed across all three major cloud providers
- Sungevity— Senior developer on a solar design SaaS product (remote, Oakland)
- VML Australia— Large-scale digital delivery for major clients
- Academic— MSc Computer Science; published research in handwritten Thai OCR at ICADL 2002
Where I've been.
What I work with.
Cloud & Infra
Architecture
AI / ML
Dev Practices
Let's talk.
I'm keen to apply my agentic engineering practices to — startups, scale-ups, or anything in between. If you're building something and need someone who can lead and ship, reach out.
The role doesn't matter as much as the mission and the team. I'm always happy to chat about
chainat@gmail.com