Night owl, tinkerer and drone pilot
Good engineering isn’t always about having the latest tools. It’s about understanding the problem and finding a practical solution.
As a kid, Liam dreamed of climbing into a rocket and heading into space. That hasn’t happened yet, but he still loves exploring new things, just a little closer to Earth.
Originally from China, Liam now calls Wellington home. His path into software has taken a few turns. He studied biotechnology in China, and his first job was at a microbiology research institute working with bacterial cultures. From growing bacteria he moved into mechanical engineering, then studied software engineering at Victoria University of Wellington. Before ComplyWith, he spent nearly four years as a developer on financial technology systems.
At ComplyWith, Liam helps maintain and improve our applications, builds new features and tracks down tricky issues. He loves the satisfaction of finding a problem whose cause isn’t obvious and getting everything working again. These days he also spends a fair bit of time guiding his “little agentic AI pet”: giving it tasks, checking its work and sometimes cleaning up after it. He’s excited by how AI is changing the way we build software.
Away from work, Liam enjoys gaming, football (more as a spectator these days), the harmonica and time with his family. He has fostered animals for the SPCA and once had his photo taken arm in arm with a rare hoolock gibbon. He also built a website of tools for fellow gamers, which is kept up to date by automated pipelines. It had more than 50,000 unique visits in its first two months.
“I enjoy figuring out how things work, sometimes a little too much,” says Liam. “A quick experiment can easily turn into a whole evening of tinkering.”
