A Complete Look Into My Work Experience

Paramount

Software Engineer, March 2024 - Present

Paramount (NASDAQ: PARA) is a multinational mass media and entertainment conglomerate that owns Paramount Pictures, CBS, BET, MTV, Nickelodean, and more.

CBS Digital (CBS News, CBS Sports, CBS.com, SportsLine, College Sports Live, 247Sports, MaxPreps) wanted to centralize their authorization experience (user registration, passwords, logins, newsletters, and payments) as the existing infrastructure was maintained by individual site teams which resulted in a fragmented and inconsistent experience.

During this role, I've worked with a federated GraphQL API, learned monorepo CI tooling with NX, collaborated with designers on maintaining the CBS Digital design system/tokens, built web pages with JS/TS/Next.js that support 1 million+ MAUs, tested code with E2E and unit-testing frameworks (Jest, Cypress, Playwright), wrote Dockerfiles for our AWS EKS environments, provisioned AWS services, and much more.

Barclays

Technology Analyst, August 2023 - March 2024

Barclays (NYSE: BCS) is a British multinational universal bank, headquartered in London, England, offering a wide range of banking, investment, and wealth management services to individual and corporate clients globally.

I was hired for this role as part of their new grad rotational program and was placed on the Mainframe team where I supported the Investment Bank's mainframe emulator as well as a cluster of servers that processes over $70 billion ADTV. In this role, I gained hands-on experience with incident/change management, Microsoft SQL, Excel, Active Directory, and Windows VMs.

Scholastic

Associate Business Analyst, January 2023 - August 2023

Scholastic (NASDAQ: SCHL) is a multinational publishing, education, and media company that publishes and distributes books, comics, and educational materials for schools, teachers, parents, children, and other educational institutions (yes, the 'Book Fair' company).

This was my first full-time job after graduation; I joined as a business analyst and throughout my eight months, I led the build, launch, and deployment of a corporate React.js eReader with features such as highlighting, notes, and audio playback.

Additionally, I led the eReader integration within two of Scholastic's most popular digital products: Ready4Reading + LiteracyPro. This role gave me invaluable experience in leading a team of engineers and designers at such an early stage in my career.

NBCUniversal

Media Tech Intern, September 2022 - December 2022

NBCUniversal (NASDAQ: CMCSA) is a mass media and entertainment conglomerate that is a subsidiary of Comcast producing hit movies such as Jurassic Park, Fast & Furious, Minions, Jaws, and more. This was my 2nd internship during my final semester in college.

At NBCU, I was apart of the Salesforce Technology Partners team, a CoE (Center of Excellence) specializing in providing and maintaining Salesforce instances throughout the organization. This role taught me how to leverage enterprise software (Salesforce, Atlassian Cloud) to help internal teams streamline their operations and workflows.

WANNAB Studio

Co-Founder & Production Lead, December 2019 - December 2022

WANNAB Studio was the second business I started when I was 18 years old, as a freshman in college. I founded this production studio with my business partner, Will Chao, and we scaled it over the next few years while studying full-time at The University of Texas.

Over 3 years, we traveled to 30+ countries and worked with 100+ brands such as Hyatt, Marriott, Tao Group, and world-renowned artists like Loud Luxury, TroyBoi, Gordo, and Marc E. Bassy.

Since graduating from college in 2022, I have stepped back from managing WANNAB to pursue a career in tech, and my business partner, Will, has taken it over full-time, handling day-to-day operations.

Yext

Technical Engagement Intern, May 2022 - August 2022

Yext (NYSE: YEXT) is a B2B SaaS platform for multi-location brands to deliver consistent, accurate, and engaging experiences.

This was my first time working for a large, publicly-traded company. I learned how enterprise software companies work, how they're structured, how they sell their products, and most importantly, how to engage with clients.

The role I was hired for was a "Technical Engagement Intern", or as I like to describe, a Technical Project Manager. In this role, my day-to-day was to assist the post-sales team with implementing Yext's product suite including tasks like ETL with Excel, documenting design requests, and platform configuration.

Daito Design

Production Design Intern, May 2021 - December 2021

Daito Design is a UI, UX, and ID design firm based out of Amsterdam. This was my first internship in college and taught me an incredible amount of what it's like to work in a "professional" environment. I got exposure to user research interviews, data synthesis, website development, and video editing.

In my 8 months working part-time, I helped fully renovate the companies website, edited customer feedback videos for TDECU (Houston's largest credit union), and helped organize synthesized user interview data in Miro.

Chào Clothing Co.

Founder & Creative Director, May 2018 - February 2019

Chao Clothing Co. was my first attempt at launching a real business. My best friend in high school and I were looking for ways to make more money and we decided to start a clothing line (he thought it'd be funny naming it as a homophone to my last name). We also wanted to contribute to a meaningful cause as my friend had previously participated in mission trips in South Texas.

We sold 70+ shirts and donated a few hundred dollars to a non-profit helping underprivileged families in McAllen, Texas.

Best Buy

Sales Consultant, October 2018 - January 2019

This was my second job at age 17 during my senior year in high school. Working at Best Buy taught me how to sell to customers in order to solve their problems. Most importantly, it taught me how to work in a stressful, chaotic environment (s/o Black Friday 2018).

Pie Five Pizza

Team Member, January 2017 - August 2017

This was my first official job at age 15 as a sophomore in high school. I made $8.75 an hour making pizzas, meal-prepping, dishwashing, and scrubbing toilets. Learnt the value of a dollar as well as how to serve customers.