Meet CTW’s Full Stack Data Engineer, Raymond Wang

Path to CTW

This is our series on the team working at CTW.

Today, we’ll spend some time with our very first full stack data engineer. Raymond was the second-ever developer to work here full time. He’s a true veteran!?

He's seen and taken part in the tech team’s many incredible contributions to the success of CTW.inc.

Tell us about yourself

Well, I’m originally from Tianjin, near Beijing. After finishing my degree in China, I went to the States to do my master’s degree in computer science at New York University. I lived there with my wife for a few years and we also worked in Seattle for a little while. It was great. I can honestly say I miss it and that we really enjoyed our lives there. We’d hoped to stay but, when I applied for the H1B visa, I couldn’t get it unfortunately.

My wife was working for Amazon at the time and they offered her a few different transfer options. I think it was between Canada, China, and Japan. We talked about it and decided that Tokyo could be interesting. So here we are.

That was about late 2017…?

As for my interests? Right now, I’m actually learning to play the piano! When I was a boy, I always wanted to learn but my parents were your typical Chinese Tiger parents. They thought it was a useless hobby, so I learned English and computers instead.

That was basically the foundation of my daily working skills!?

And now that I’ve found some success in my career, I think it’s time to let that kid inside me learn the piano. It's never too late to start doing what you love. I bought one earlier this year, and I’ve started learning by myself.

How were the early days of CTW?

So when I first came to Japan, my wife and I wanted to stay for around one year. I was mostly just interested in being a freelancer. But after a while, I thought it could be good to experience working full time as well. At the time, a friend referred CTW to me, telling me that they were looking to hire for a new tech team.

I thought maybe I should give it a try. I’d heard that there were only two full-time positions in the tech department at that time and, when I came for the interview, I met our current CTO. Although it was just a small company, the environment and atmosphere were really good. They had a strong vision for the future, so I took the job.

This was in 2018. After about a year, our chief engineer and current engineering manager also joined CTW and, with them, we had a team who could build the full stack — front end, back end, and infrastructure. That was the point where our tech department became more than just a support team for the company.?

We began making tools and products that would have huge impacts on the business. Between the four of us, we had enough skill to significantly increase CTW's profits. Yeah, those days were pretty cool. And since then, our team has just kept growing bigger and bigger.

What surprised you about working here?

So for the tech team, the early stages were fairly easy. We could never go wrong in a basic support role since we were mostly adding robustness to the systems, finding out what worked and didn’t. After that, we began looking at how else we could impact the business.

But we thought, “How do we do that?” We’d need to follow some kind of logic or principles.

That’s when we decided that, in the tech department, our focus would be on building a data-driven business. Whatever we’re doing — if it’s building up our game platform, working on advertising, or making big decisions — we must have data to ground us.

So let me give you one example of this.

It was early in 2019. Our monthly advertising costs were very high. So many zeroes... Every month we were spending huge amounts to keep our business growing. But it can be very hard on a company to keep scaling that spending over the long term.?

So we had an idea. Our Chief Data Officer and another member of the team proposed something interesting. It would probably sound strange to a non-tech person, but they explained the data science behind this idea to the leadership. They said that we could cut the marketing budget in half, while keeping the same level of revenue. Normally, in a big company, such a proposal would take a very long time to be approved. But they were persuasive and they got the go-ahead.

It took around six months to build the data warehouse and set up the data prediction model. During all this work, they kept saying how they were sure that we’d cut our budget in half without affecting the income. Come July or August of that year, they just did it.

And the result was exactly the same as their prediction. That was pretty cool.

So, for me, I’ve been here since we were only this little, unknown company in Japan. But at the end of last year, we’re already expanding our business globally. We’re Number 1 in Japan. When we say, “We’re going to be the world's largest H5 platform,” I think it’s more than a vision. It’s within reach.

What kind of developers are you looking for?

I think the big difference between our team and the big companies is that we don't want someone who is happy just working on small sections of code. They've got to see the big picture of what they’re doing.

I mean, sure, when you join you might learn about the system and adjust some features. But after that, even interns get a chance to carry individual projects!

So to join CTW as a developer, you need to be skilled at active thinking. You need to be able to turn thoughts and ideas into practical solutions and to do it quickly. We like people who are eager, fast learners.

Our stack is new and our development integration is pretty fast. You’re continuously learning new things.

In the whole tech department, we’ve currently got two sub-departments.

• One is the App Team

They’re the core of CTW’s G123 IP game platform service. For their skill set, the front end needs React and TypeScript. And for the back end, they're using Java Spring Boot. In our new projects, they just started embracing Golang. For the instructor, we’re now building our own infrastructure base based on AWS and Kubernetes.?

Devs looking to join us need to know the whole skill set: Kubernetes, TerraForm, and the rest.

• The other is the Data Team

Our issue right now is that our skill sets have become mostly the same. To join the data science team, you need to know how to build modeling and use Python. In the data engineering team, we usually use React and TypeScript, and JavaScript for the front end. And for the back end, we use three major skills: JS, Graph QL, and also some Python services like Flask.

Are you working on anything interesting right now?

Yeah, I just launched something pretty cool about a month ago. It's our new debugging tool.?

It’s something that’s really important for both our game operations teams and our content providers (CPs — outsourced game devs) in China.

When the CPs need to integrate with our API — that’s the application programming interface, how two separate computer systems access and talk to each other — they need to read the documents on our system and integrate theirs with ours.

Once this is done, and the new game is ready to go, they tell us to test it. Before we had the debugging tool, the CPs and game operations teams kept a constant line of communication open. The game ops manager lost so much time chasing down each issue and then talking it over with the CPs. It was a real problem in terms of time and manpower wasted.

So I developed a debugging tool which automatically collects all the data needed in the handover. It checks the data they integrate with our API and validates everything automatically. If something’s wrong, I've built a UI screen that tells both sides — our team and the CPs — where the problem is and what’s going wrong with the current implementation.

It's saving entire departments a lot of valuable time every time we adopt a new game onto our platform.

I got to build the whole thing from scratch, which was a great learning experience for me.?

That’s the cool thing about working here.

The culture of our tech team is to learn, try out new things, grow as developers, and grow the company.

____________

For more information about our available positions, have a look below.?

We’re actively looking for talent in the following roles.

Front-end Engineers

https://lnkd.in/dAbMnXm7

Backend Engineers: Golang + Python

https://lnkd.in/gg-hGe3v

https://lnkd.in/g-v_Yfwa

Dev Ops Engineers

https://lnkd.in/grdpA4TQ

NLP Research Scientist

https://lnkd.in/ghMCPxVg

Data Engineer — Scala

https://lnkd.in/ghxFu4G8

Product Manager

https://lnkd.in/gC_fk9WB