About Rick Wong

I am Rick Wong. I lead product and engineering, and I lean hard on AI in how the work gets done.

I’m currently leading AI enablement as a product and engineering executive.

At DataSaa I do that work three ways: product and engineering leadership for startups going AI-native, AI enablement for the team you already have, and coverage when a leadership seat is open while you hire. Execution, people, the release bar, and judgment on the hard calls.

I’ve held the IC seats in product and engineering, up through the executive seat. I work across engineering, product and program at once. My approach is to empower the team so dependency never grows on me.

Previously

• Allergan Data Labs, engineering leadership: led multiple engineering teams, set the architecture for business-critical systems, and promoted senior engineers into lead, staff and manager roles.
• Ruggable, Director of Ops Product and Engineering: stabilized and grew the engineering team, and brought in production monitoring, automated testing and CI/CD.
• Cypress Creek Renewables, VP, Technology Innovation: turned an external contracting team into an in-house product team, and rebuilt a monolith as Node.js microservices on Kafka.
• ADP, Senior Product Manager: brought predictability to a cloud ERP-integration initiative spanning several products and teams.
• Syncromatics, Product Manager: set the roadmap to move up-market, and delivered a real-time fleet analytics dashboard.
• Cornerstone OnDemand, Principal Engineer: led the move from a monolith toward a service-oriented architecture with on-demand deployment.
• Kareo, Lead Developer: primary application engineer on the patient-payments product, from customer discovery through rollout, and lead on the shared web framework.

I studied Computer/Electrical Engineering at UCLA.

What people I’ve worked with say is on LinkedIn recommendations.

Field notes on AI operating systems live on AI Agent Management, including my about page there. That site is a separate publication.