Elliott Polk

United States / Canada / Hong Kong SAR
elliott@tkwcafe.com @elliottpolk @elliottpolk

Principal Systems Engineer | AI Infrastructure, DevEx & Edge Systems

Hands-on Principal Systems Engineer specializing in the infrastructure bottlenecks of emerging Agentic AI, Enterprise DevEx, and Edge environments. I thrive at the intersection of execution and strategy, staying deep in the codebase to build orchestration layers and evaluation harnesses while pulling back to the architectural level to align cross-functional stakeholders on complex system boundaries. I engineer the governed pipelines that allow complex systems, ranging from non-deterministic coding agents to distributed 3D printer farms, to run reliably in production. Over two decades, I have engineered solutions across Go, Python, C++, Java, and Kubernetes to bridge software, physical hardware, and AI.

Core Capabilities

  • AI Tooling & Orchestration: Agent evaluation harnesses, autonomous test suite auditing, autonomous test suite design and evolution, multi-run confidence modeling, portable agent profiles, LLM orchestration.
  • Edge & Hardware Integration: Computer vision prototyping, constrained-network data sync, distributed device farms, hardware-bridge APIs, offline-capable edge clients.
  • Enterprise DevEx & Platforms: Internal Developer Platforms (IDPs), CI/CD governance, OCI artifact lineage, GitHub Enterprise, workload isolation.
  • Polyglot Systems Engineering: Go, Python, C++, Java, C#, SQL/NoSQL, distributed polyglot architectures, container orchestration (Docker/K8s).

Professional Experience

Manulife

Principal Software Engineer, Global Enterprise Technology Services
August 2024 to Present | Hong Kong SAR / Global

  • Testing-Oracle: Designed and built specialized agents to audit existing enterprise repositories for legacy testing patterns, and developed agents to autonomously revamp codebases toward an idealistic target-state testing architecture.
  • Agentic Evaluation Foundations: Engineered evidence-driven foundations for agent-assisted engineering. Built cross-tool coding-agent benchmarks, repeatable evaluation harnesses, and multi-run confidence models utilizing equivalence scoring over exact-match logic.
  • Repository-Aware Agent Patterns: Designed and coded defensive patterns that allow AI agents to recognize institutional architecture, widen their context, and avoid generating operationally unsafe code.
  • Global Platform Architecture: Led the system design and implementation for global internal developer platforms, establishing actor contracts, service boundaries, and orchestration flows with key stakeholders.
  • Source Code Consolidation: Executed the global technical migration of Bitbucket, GitHub Enterprise Server, and GitHub Enterprise Cloud into one managed platform with unified compliance controls.

Principal Software Engineer, Global Wealth & Asset Management
April 2020 to August 2024 | Toronto, Ontario, Canada

  • Container Workload Governance: Built the enterprise container-management strategy, coding automated pipelines for build inspection, OCI artifact lineage, signing, promotion, and workload isolation.
  • DevSecOps Automation: Defined and programmed composable CI/CD practices using GitHub Advanced Security and container image scanning, ensuring automated security controls with traceable exceptions.
  • High-Stakes Technical Authority: Guided engineering teams as the primary hands-on technical decision-maker through prolonged critical infrastructure outages affecting millions of North American customers.

Lead Full-Stack Engineer, Global Wealth & Asset Management
November 2016 to December 2017 | Hong Kong SAR

  • Monolith to Microservices: Architected and built a distributed Go and MongoDB platform to replace a legacy VB.NET cash-redistribution desktop application.
  • Offline-Capable Modernization: Rewrote a legacy ASP.NET platform in .NET Core and MongoDB, utilizing local Realm databases to enable full offline operation for field agents.

Cathay Pacific Airways

Senior Research & Systems Developer
April 2014 to November 2016 | Hong Kong SAR

  • Aviation Computer Vision & Perception: Researched and prototyped 3D scanning and computer vision systems for measuring aircraft skin damage, as well as OCR tooling to recognize cargo container placement and orientation.
  • Safety-Critical Edge Architecture: Architected and coded a globally distributed Electronic Flight Bag (EFB) platform. Built the highly distributed Go ground system and the offline-capable in-aircraft .NET edge clients.
  • UAV & Autonomous Hardware: Conducted R&D on UAV/UGV (drone/robotics) operational systems, electronic baggage tags, and beacon management for complex airport environments.

Makible Ltd.

Chief Software Engineer
May 2012 to April 2014 | Hong Kong SAR

  • Distributed Device Farms: Researched and prototyped a Go-based distributed system allowing intelligent injection molders, CNC machines, and 3D printers to operate in a unified device “farm” managed from edge clients.
  • Hardware Bridge Tooling: Designed and built custom Chrome Packaged App host applications to interface directly with 3D printers, bypassing traditional heavy drivers to allow control from low-cost hardware.

Travelzen

Senior Software Engineer
February 2011 to April 2012 | Hong Kong SAR

  • Search Engine Architecture: Re-architected a high-concurrency flight search engine to concurrently retrieve inventory across external partner APIs while matching local private inventory in real-time.
  • Data Pipeline Acceleration: Migrated heavy Oracle datasets into in-memory MySQL clusters to drastically reduce query wait times.

Earlier Experience

California State Auto Association (CSAA / AAA), IT Developer II
2005 to 2006

Constrained-Network Edge Systems: Designed custom C# image compression and transmission applications on Windows Mobile to reliably capture and transmit high-resolution field data over severely bandwidth-constrained 3G networks.

Open Source Research

  • Agentic Kernel: Built and maintain the open-source Agentic Kernel, a platform-agnostic system designed for portable agent profiles, persistent context, skills, and workflows across multiple LLM providers, which also serves as the foundational architecture for the specialized Journal Kernel variant.

Education

Art Institute of San Francisco
Visual and Game Programming, 2004 to 2005

City College of San Francisco
Computer Science, 2002 to 2004