Meet CTW’s VP of Artificial Intelligence, Neil Yuki

This is our series on the team working at CTW.

Today, we’ll spend some time with Neil Yuki. Our Vice President of Artificial Intelligence has built the data platform for Rakuten, LINE, and Indeed. With the rapid development of AI technology and his passion for improvement, he concluded that CTW is the best fit for his future endeavors.

Tell us a little about yourself

My name is Neil Yuki, you can call me Neil, and I am from Taiwan. It is quite interesting how I ended up hereーworking in the IT field in Japan. As a kid, I always preferred to learn mathematics and similar subjects at school. During high school, I was really good at chemistry, and almost decided to further my study in the chemistry field.

However, around 2001-2002 there was a big issueーa lot of concern and criticismーregarding oil energy. At that time, I was deciding my major in university, and I became unsure about continuing to study chemistry. Around the same time, the field of computer science, electrical engineering, and mechanical engineering became really popular in Taiwan. I think that is one of the reasons why I decided to study computer science.

During my graduate studies, my area of research was image processing. As a part of computer science, I also learned about algorithms and machine learning. At that time, the term big data and artificial intelligence was not commonly used as nowadays. But, I have always been interested in that area.?

What were your first experiences working in Japan?

I came to Japan in 2012, thanks to a friend's recommendation, and started working as a software engineer at Rakuten. Before that, I was involved in the semiconductor manufacturing industry in Taiwan.?

Of course, it was hard in the beginning as it is a different fieldーsemiconductor to IT. Before entering this IT field, I mainly used C++, and never even used Java and Python. Honestly, though it was stressful at first, I learned so many things after joining Rakuten.

Initially, I was only entrusted with API development in Rakuten Ichiba. However, by 2013, I began to delve into the realm of big data. My work encompassed various data platforms, including Hadoop and Cassandra. I held the pivotal role of constructing Rakuten's primary Hadoop platform and its ecosystem, a project of enduring utility that continues to be in operation to this day.

Where did you go next in your career?

In 2016, I started working at LINE, the messaging app company. During my time there, I was responsible for building the main Hadoop platform. The platform catered to an enormous volume of over a hundred petabytes of data, which served 600-700 users within the company. After solidifying the platform's stability over a few years, I began to look for more challenges and new opportunities for growth.

That was when I decided to join Indeed.com, an employment website for job listings, in 2019. Similarly to my experience in LINE, I took the role of building the Hadoop cluster for Indeed. However, as the time went by, Hadoop became less popular and we began to work on everything in AWS. My responsibility was not limited to building the data pipeline anymore, I also created various internal? tools for the organization. At that moment, my role kind of shifted from Data Architect to Full-Stack Engineer.?

Naturally, I also worked on some machine learning stuff during my work. Paired with the rise of artificial intelligence, such as ChatGPT, I decide to pursue this field further.

What convinced you to join CTW?

Indeed, transitioning from my previous company to CTW is quite a big change. I have known some people working here personally. We have worked together many years prior, although within different companies.

The executive officer, Chin-san, invited me to the office and I got to learn more about the working style here. I was really impressed to see many highly-motivated and talented people working in this fast-paced environment. Even though I was confused at first, I got really excited about joining after learning about the company vision and what people are doing here. I want to work with people that want to do something exciting and special.

What is your current role & responsibility??

As the Vice President of Artificial Intelligence, I am involved in projects which are not only relevant to AI.

With the rise of artificial intelligence, I am experimenting more with AI to improve our overall system. In CTW, we have been using this new technology in various projects. For our game localization effort, we have our own AI translation tool to assist our in-house localization team. We have also developed an image generation tool, which aids in enhancing our efficiency in creating game graphics.?

The project I am working on right now is Customer Service Chatbot for our G123 platform. By implementing AI, we hope to help our Customer Support team, to lessen their burden and make their work more efficient. The tool is almost finished and we are planning to release it very soon.

Not only limited to the G123 platform, I would like to make the processes more seamless for our internal system as well. A few months ago, we released our own internal AI assistant. I am planning to further improve the ability of this bot to assist the internal team here in CTW; product managers, human resources, recruiters, and even the creative team. Right now we are just getting started, there is still a long way to go. I am excited about many things that we can experiment with AI.

What surprised you the most about CTW?

In my previous company, the working style was totally different, it mainly used a remote working style. There were not many people coming to the office; many people preferred to work by themselves at home. I can hardly feel the teamworkーsitting next to each other and collaborating with the people in the team, pushing towards the same goal. There were even some of my colleagues that I have never met outside of the video call. I much prefer the working style here in CTW. I like to talk, so coming to the office everyday is something that I actually really enjoy.?

Also, I was really surprised at how skilled the people working here are, like really really smart people. I have been wondering for a while now, “How does this company gather all these talented people?”. The people here are very good at their own things, when they realize the stuff is not working, they can just stop and change it. I personally really like this kind of working styleーfast-paced environment that allows us to do trial and errorーit is the reason why we are here.

What kind of people would you like to work with in CTW?

I would really like to work with highly motivated people. This environment is really suitable for someone who is proactiveーtakes initiative to approach work or projects without needing constant supervision. They should also be capable of communicating their ideas and opinions to fellow team members, and work together to implement those ideas.

As CTW is not a big companyーwith currently around 200 people working hereーI see it as everyone is basically in the same boat. As a team, each of the members have to paddle together towards the same direction in order to achieve the same goal. The best thing about working here is that we are not afraid to fail.

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

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

Product Manager

https://apply.workable.com/ctw/j/7FD60008D6/

Site Reliability Engineer (SRE)

https://apply.workable.com/ctw/j/10F88AE11E/

Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) - JPN

https://apply.workable.com/ctw/j/BFA8BD2DB1/

DevOps Engineer

https://apply.workable.com/ctw/j/777A182802/

DevOps Engineer - JPN

https://apply.workable.com/ctw/j/DEFF5F3242/