Christopher Yang

Managing Director, Shopline US

2024 - Current

Lead Shopline's US operations, playing a pivotal role in the formulation and implementation of strategic initiatives aimed at increasing market share, elevating customer satisfaction levels, and fostering sustainable growth. Report directly to the global CEO and assume full P&L accountability, underscoring a deep commitment to guiding our financial performance towards unparalleled achievements. Explore new business opportunities, cultivate a culture of innovation, and guide our team in redefining the commerce landscape with unmatched agility and precision.

Board of Governors

2022

Executive Board Member, Los Angeles Chapter

2019

Provide funding and mentorship to early-stage, high-growth startups in Internet, B2B Saas, e-commerce and digital health. Co-chair the event committee and manage TCA’s relationship with universities, accelerators, and VCs. Plan and organize events to increase TCA’s exposure to potential new members and start-ups.

Venture Partner

2024

Member and Contributor

2019

Contribute to Forbes on the topics related to technology, leadership, entrepreneurship, business strategy and technical project management.

Investor and Board Observer

2023

Co-led Giftpack's 4.3M Seed Round, underpinning the 20M AI-driven platform's vision to redefine corporate gifting.

Investor and Limited Partner

2021

Invest in the next generation of Asian American founders. • Provided startup capital to fast-growing companies, including Series A: Rocket Dollar, Sanzo, Toybox Labs; Series B: ShopShops, Homecourt, TrueNorth, Drop, Yumi; Series C: TomoCredit, Mayvenn, Unit21.

Vice President of Engineering

2022 - 2024

Create elegant, future-facing experiences and technologies that transform travel and inspire people to get away more. Lead all engineering functions (40+ engineers), including product engineering, QA, data, DevOps, and SRE for the 1.4 billion direct-to-consumer lifestyle brand. • Drove AI/ML-driven next-best item recommendations using collaborative filtering (FP-Growth) on PDPs and shopping carts, resulting in a $5M annual increase in Revenue Per Visitor, significantly impacting revenue growth. • Led the migration of the front-end application to edge hosting, incorporating static site generation and incremental site regeneration, and decoupling the UI from the core commerce platform to establish a headless architecture. This pivotal shift significantly improved web traffic management, empowering the application to handle a 40x increase in load capacity seamlessly. • Spearheaded the rollout of full-stack observability for more than 15 applications and cloud services, including proprietary and SaaS products. This strategic implementation enhanced system reliability and performance through comprehensive application performance monitoring. • Improved core web vitals and marketing efficiency by streamlining marketing technology, centralizing tracking, and removing outdated pixels and legacy software. • Elevated application reliability by seamlessly integrating end-to-end test automation with Playwright into CI pipeline, achieving greater consistency in quality and performance across all software products. • Established a centralized customer data hub for effective collection, organization, and retrieval of data from diverse sources, fostering efficient customer data utilization across various teams and enhancing data-driven decision-making.

Instructor, Department of Engineering & Technology

2018 - 2023

Develop and deliver post-baccalaureate curriculums in the Department of Engineering & Technology at UCLA Extension. Teach Agile Methodologies with Scrum and Kanban (MGMT X 446.1), Agile Frameworks including XP and Lean SD (MGMT X 446.2), and Risk Analysis and Project Management (MGMT X 443.2) online, at nights, and over weekends.

Vice President Of Engineering

2021 - 2022

Lead a global team of around 50 engineers across the United States, Hungary, and Russia in designing and launching an AI-powered travel marketplace intended to bring abundance, and price transparency to its travelers . Drive cross-functional decisions and alignment with product, sales, marketing, and operations teams to deliver superb customer experience and shared business outcomes. Serve as a key member of Onriva's Executive Leadership Committee. Provide inspired leadership and cohesive organizational direction while championing a culture of integrity and excellence. • Launched Onriva’s travel marketplace in September 2021, resulting in 200% MOM growth in Q4. • Delivered key project initiatives including unused ticket automated exchange, duty of care, marketplace content and search optimization, and martech integrations. • Successfully recruited and trained three new high-performing US teams within my first four months in the position.

Vice President, Engineering

2018 - 2021

Expanded responsibilities to head a North American engineering organization with 50+ technical staff members across corporate, loyalty, and leisure travel (1.5B of annual transactional volume). Harnessed a modern, scalable technology stack to deliver excellent customer experiences through our suite of travel products, including Lightning, CTM Portal, CTM Mobile, CTM Loyalty Solutions, and MTravel. • Reduced annual transactional expenses by $700K by replacing vendor solutions with CTM’s proprietary loyalty applications and services. • Increased annual booking volume by 1.5% ($3M) with the launch of a new, shopping cart-like online travel booking tool. • Reduced IT operation and maintenance costs by over 60% by migrating clients off legacy applications to a common multi-tenant system. • Amalgamated legacy PHP and C# tech stacks by designing and implementing a heterogeneous microservice architecture, resulting in over $2M savings in development expenses. • Increased value delivery by leading the transformation of software development processes from Waterfall to Scrum and Kanban; created enterprise agility, project visibility, and a culture of continuous improvement through evidence-based empirical methods. • Refactored monolithic applications into microservices, effectively improving platform scalability, reliability, reusability, data security, and fault isolation. • Improved product development time to market and code quality by implementing test automation across all layers of the test pyramid. • Upgraded PHP version from 5.6 to 7.2 to incorporate new development features, performance enhancements, and security fixes on loyalty platforms. • Designed and launched CTM’s first machine learning product recommendation system on Azure, with high model precision and accuracy. • Sparked creativity and innovation by sponsoring and leading CTM’s annual artificial intelligence hackathon.

Vice President, Loyalty & Leisure Technology

2018 - 2018

Provided vision, executive leadership, and business alignment that led to the development and implementation of strategic technology initiatives across all areas of loyalty, host agency, leisure, and event travel in North America. Oversaw 40+ technical staff members, including product managers, program managers, business analysts, user experience (UX) designers, software development engineers, and software development engineers in test (SDETs) to support over $350M of travel business. Evangelized technology internally and externally to develop, maintain, and enhance products on both business-to-business and business-to-consumer roadmaps. • Built the technology organization from the ground up; recruited over 40 highly skilled FTEs and contractors across product, engineering, analytics, and project management in eight months. • Released industry-leading platform features, including Branded Fares (+34.2% in upsell), Premium Paid Seats, Travel Search Widget (+5% in unique searches), Universal Traveler Profile (+16% in adoption), Bonus Points Earned (+2% in total transactions), Explore Map (+2.25% in unique searches), and various UX/UI redesigns and enhancements.

Senior Director, Loyalty Technology

2017 - 2018

Recruited by Global CTO to head US Loyalty Technology Division. Oversaw product management, UX design, engineering, quality assurance, business analytics and technical delivery groups to build technology solutions for a 200M loyalty line of business.