Engineering leadership
Leading teams through ambiguous product, platform, support, and operational problems.
Engineering Leader · Ottawa, Canada
Jiajian Yang
Engineering leader building SaaS platforms and the forward-deployed, agent-driven systems that run real business operations underneath them.
Based in Ottawa, Canada. I lead engineering teams across platform systems, customer engineering, analytics infrastructure, security, and internal tools — and increasingly build agentic systems that execute bounded business workflows directly, rather than just assist a person at a keyboard.
What I do
How I work and where I add value
Platform and data systems
Backend systems, data infrastructure, observability, integrations, and reliability.
Forward Deployed Engineering
Designing agentic systems that execute bounded business workflows directly — observing real operational state, acting within explicit limits, and handing off to a person when judgment is genuinely needed, rather than adding a chat interface on top of existing software.
Selected focus areas
Where I spend my time
- SaaS platform engineering
- Customer-facing infrastructure
- Support engineering and operational tooling
- Analytics and data platform modernization
- Security, compliance, and engineering process
- Forward Deployed Engineering and agentic operations
- Homelab, networking, and infrastructure experiments
Projects
Selected projects and experiments
LeaseLab
A real property-management system, used as the proving ground for Forward Deployed Engineering: agentic workflows that detect real operational exceptions, act within explicit human-set boundaries, and hand off to a landlord only when judgment is genuinely needed.
LandlordLab
Property management tooling and operational experiments.
Engineering Notes
Technical writing on infrastructure, systems, AI workflows, and leadership.
Photography
Personal photography portfolio.
Writing
Technical notes and engineering writing
I write about the practical side of building and leading engineering teams.
- Engineering leadership
- Backend and platform architecture
- AI-assisted engineering
- Homelab and infrastructure
- Product building
Contact
Let's talk
For engineering leadership, advisory, collaboration, or project conversations: