About me

I'm Jackie Tung. I provide bespoke platform engineering services to early-stage startups.

Why

I've spent decades building platform and infrastructure for startups, and I keep seeing the same situation play out:

The top priority is always to ship fast and find product market fit (or grow) — as it should be.

At the same time, platform infrastructure is critical to product velocity. For instance:

• Smooth CI enables safe, fast integration of features and fixes.
• Solid CD means reliable, timely shipping to customers.
• Observability enables fast fault discovery and resolution.
• Good security fundamentals reduce incidents that distract from product work.
• Infrastructure as code brings the same benefits as software: code review, CI/CD, static checks — no more guessing who changed what, when, and why.

However, it's difficult to know when to prioritize platform over product work. Shipped features are concrete and easy to reason about; a faster CI/CD setup is harder to map to business outcomes — even though the value is real.

The common outcome is underinvestment in platform engineering.

Spinning up a dedicated platform pod is a good idea — but hiring is its own challenge. Maybe there isn't quite enough steady-state work to justify a full-time hire yet. Or the right person, with the right skillset and culture fit, is hard to find.

Without a dedicated platform team, product engineers get pulled into platform work — their familiarity with the codebase helps, but product output suffers, and short term matters a lot in startups. Rushing back to product work often leaves platform tooling stuck in a permanent MVP state.

This is the gap I close: great platform engineering, without slowing product down. Lay the foundations early, so when it's time to build an in-house team, you're scaling something solid.