~/forward-deployed-engineer $ cat forward-deployed-engineer.md

Forward Deployed Engineer Malaysia & Singapore

I鈥檓 Johnson Lai, a Forward Deployed Engineer in Malaysia and Singapore.

Teams usually come to me with an AI idea and no time to build it. I work inside the team, learn how the work really runs, and ship the system: workflow automation, internal agents, a local LLM, RAG with evals, or all of it wired together. The goal is something your team uses every day, not a slide deck.

Hand-drawn wizard penguin turning a rough team workflow road into a shipped agent system and reusable playbook

What I can help with

  • Automating a workflow your team repeats every week
  • Internal AI agents that call your own tools and APIs
  • Running LLMs privately, on your hardware or in your cloud
  • RAG with evals and quality gates, so you know when answers get worse
  • AI-native products and operations, built end to end

Track record

  • Advised fintech and listed-company teams on putting AI into production.
  • Head of Data & AI at Chromia, where I build agent-first workflows for marketing, engineering and operations.
  • Hands-on with local LLMs and GPUs: llama.cpp, vLLM, SGLang, Qwen, evals and coding agents.
  • Crypto 脳 AI work on decentralized inference, on-chain agents and verifiable AI.

How I work

My Multica workflow shows the setup I bring to an engagement: a human reviewer running a fleet of coding agents, with a local Qwen model doing junior-dev work.

Need a Forward Deployed Engineer in Singapore or Malaysia, an AI solutions architect, or a hands-on AI consultant? Send me a message, or reach me on LinkedIn or X.