Jay Zeng
I lead software delivery and AI transformation across regulated industries — finance and healthcare.As VP at crypto.com — a global financial platform serving 100M+ users — I led multiple scrum teams across six locations: shipping 0-to-1 production platforms, including a regulated tokenized-securities (RWA) business taken from architecture through regulatory review to production, building AI applications on the group's internal AI gateway, and driving AI-assisted development to 100% adoption with guardrails for model evaluation, cost governance, and code ownership. Previously delivery lead for Standard Chartered's China retail banking, delivering the bank's first containerized application for compliance workflows.
Open to Senior engineering leadership roles — Senior Engineering Manager / Head of Engineering / Head of Data & AI / Director of Software Engineering (AI-enabled delivery) — in financial services, and in other industries driving engineering AI transformation.
Experience
- Led multiple scrum teams across six locations — AI-platform, RWA & digital-asset, and market-data delivery. Owned headcount planning, performance management & calibration, pay/reward, and budgets
- Drove AI-assisted software development to 100% adoption across the engineering organization — 12+ months of tooling rollout (Claude Code, Cursor, Augment) within the group's org-wide AI-SDLC (AIDLC) transformation, with guardrails for model evaluation, cost governance, and code ownership
- Led the team that built AI-powered applications on the group's internal AI gateway — including Augur, an LLM + RAG market-intelligence platform co-created with the crypto.com Capital team, serving investment research, CRM client engagement, and the US-equity RWA business
- Established the tokenized-securities (RWA) business 0-to-1 — full lifecycle from architecture through regulatory review to production, alongside real-time market-data platforms and finance digital transformation — automated daily client-transaction accounting and treasury reporting
- Managed market-data vendor relationships (ICE, CoinGecko, CoinMarketCap)
- Led delivery of RB CDD Review — Standard Chartered China's first containerized application, digitizing retail-banking compliance (KYC/CDD review) workflows — in partnership with the China country technology management team and the CDD team
- Owned SCB China's retail-banking delivery portfolio, managing multiple delivery teams across Shanghai and Tianjin (BAU, new initiatives, platform integration)
- Initiated the Shanghai API Banking engineering team build-out — stood up hiring and knowledge transfer from the Singapore core team
- Led partnership and vendor evaluation with Alipay, Ctrip Finance, and JD Finance — scoped product-listing feasibility and integration architecture for SCB retail products on third-party platforms (paused due to regulatory change)
- Led one of four scrum teams at AGFA's Shanghai R&D site, and served as site technical manager — the technical bridge to global R&D hubs in Waterloo, Ghent, and Vienna, jointly driving the evolution of the Enterprise Imaging Platform
- Led the team that delivered the platform's rule engine (Drools) and enterprise image-transfer capabilities — powering rule-directed clinical workflows, image routing and prefetching, report distribution, and storage-lifecycle management
- Full-stack engineering leadership for the Enterprise Imaging Platform — large-scale medical imaging with distributed hub-proxy architecture and high-availability deployment; domain depth across DICOM, HL7, IHE, FHIR
- Drove DevOps adoption across the Shanghai site — established CI/CD pipelines, regression testing workflows, and release management practices
What I build
Autonomous DeFi Fund Manager
Autonomous portfolio management system that discovers opportunities, allocates capital via MVO, and executes trades on-chain. A 15-step LangGraph agent pipeline orchestrates pool discovery, AI-driven debate (Bull/Bear/Judge LLMs), MVO with 6 constraint layers, pre-flight simulation, 8-layer concentration firewall, and AWS KMS signing — with human-in-the-loop approval for large trades. 21 protocol adapters across EVM and Solana. Python backend with Next.js dashboard. Deployed on Kubernetes. Authored a 10-part tutorial series on the mathematical foundations.
AI-Powered DeFi Analytics
Live DeFi yield intelligence platform at obolai.hk. Users ask questions; the platform classifies intent (rule-based), scores pools (6-factor risk model, backtest-validated against 58 exploits), and returns analysis with code-anchored bull/bear debate. 3-tier pricing (Free/$0.25/$0.50), daily Twitter digest, wallet-aware recommendations. A separate Python quant engine runs an internal capital strategy with backtested results: Sharpe 13.64, +10% alpha over 66 days. 51K lines TypeScript + ~2K lines Python. 58 test files. Live at obolai.hk.
Articles & research
The Three Pillars of AI Transformation
AI transformation is more than tool adoption or shipping features. The three pillars — offense, defense, and operations — and what a complete, effective, secure transformation actually requires.
AI Models Are the New Fiber
Chinese AI models capture 46% of US enterprise token usage. Claude costs 178× more than DeepSeek. The model layer is becoming infrastructure — here's where the value actually goes.
Tokenized Stocks: How Real-World Assets Bridge Traditional Finance and DeFi
A three-layer framework for stock tokenization — regulatory strategy, token economics, and technical implementation. Real case studies from Ondo, BackedFi, and Dinari.
DeFi Yield Optimization: From Auto-Compounding to AI Agents
Four generations of DeFi yield strategies — from Yearn's automation to Pendle's yield trading to AI-driven optimization. What changed and who won.
Yield-Bearing Stablecoins: Where Does the Yield Come From?
Five core yield models analyzed — Ethena, Usual, Ondo, Strata. How the $11B yield-bearing stablecoin market challenges traditional issuers, and the risks behind the yields.
Get in touch
Jay Zeng
Shanghai · Hong Kong
Engineering leadership — digital assets, AI, and financial infrastructure
Currently exploring Director / Head of-level engineering leadership roles in AI, digital assets, and financial infrastructure. If that's what you're building, I'd welcome the conversation.