Fred Wu

Founder @ Rizz.farm

10/2023 - Present | Melbourne, Australia

AI-assisted lead generation and growth hacking for Reddit and beyond. A refreshing take on lead generation, by helping people with highly relevant information and storytelling.

Founder @ Persumi

03/2023 - Present | Melbourne, Australia

Level up your writing and blogging with AI.

Like Wordpress, but modern, smart and connected.

Organise your content and audience based on personas - showcase your different personalities, skills and interests in one cohesive way.

We turn your words into audio - creating a podcast has never been easier.

Founder & Freelancer @ Wuit

01/2005 - Present | Remote / Melbourne, Australia

Recent freelance projects:

• Petal Framework (Web Framework, Elixir)
• Coinbits (Crypto product, Elixir)
• CoinJar (Crypto exchange, Elixir + Ruby)
• TVDataNow (AdTech, Elixir + JS)
• eBoss (Workflow, Elixir + ML + Agentic AI)

CTO @ BioConcepts

07/2023 - 12/2024| Remote / Melbourne, Australia

Led and built a next-gen digital pathology interpretation tool leveraging ML/AI.

Consulting CTO @ BIG4 Holiday Parks

02/2024 - 10/2024 | Remote / Melbourne, Australia

Helped revamp and uplift the technology capability and strategic roadmap of BIG4.

CTO @ Verrency

12/2020 - 07/2023 | Remote / Melbourne, Australia

Partnered with Visa, Eftpos and FIS, Verrency offers turn‐key solutions to enterprises and SMEs in the fintech and sustainability spaces around the globe.

Head of Engineering @ Xplor

09/2017 - 12/2020 | Melbourne, Australia

Lead a group of 40+ engineers to make great child care and early education software. As part of the senior leadership team and reported to the CEO, helped building and turning the company into a market leader.

CTO @ ECAL

11/2016 - 09/2017 | Melbourne, Australia

Lead a distributed team of devs, ops and QAs, in Melbourne and in Manila Philippines. Together we built, maintained and supported the ECAL calendar platform that connects publishers with their users.

We served millions of requests a day for our publisher clients, some of whom are household brands like the English Premiere League, Ticketmaster and Cricket Australia.

Senior Engineer (Contract) @ Blix

07/2016 - 11/2016 | Melbourne, Australia

A fixed term contract to work on Blix Traffic and have it deployed to a global retail brand with 100+ stores in Australia.

Blix Traffic collects anonymous smartphone data to deliver the most advanced people counting, customer experience and footfall analytics on the market today.

Head of Engineering @ Paddl

02/2016 - 06/2016 | Melbourne, Australia

As part of the Senior Leadership Team, built and lead a champion engineering team. As a member of the Product Guild, helped drive and shape the vision and direction of the products.

Delivery Lead @ REA Group

10/2014 - 02/2016 | Melbourne, Australia

As part of Group Platform and later on Finance and Business Services, “The Money” tribe’s goal was to uplift and transform the “quote-to-cash” process for the entire organisation, i.e. from on-boarding customers, presenting product offerings and pricing, payments, invoicing, receipting all the way to reconciliation.

As a delivery lead, led two squads - Products and Pricing, with squad members located in Melbourne, Perth and Xi’an, China. Built and transformed systems to centralise pricing data, as well as systems to overhaul the products and deals platform.

Led the effort in recruitment for The Money tribe.

Team Lead @ Locomote

06/2012 - 10/2014 | Melbourne, Australia

Spearheaded and architected the Locomote Travel Management Platform which is now being used by major clients such as ANZ, Medibank and World Vision.

Built and lead a champion team to work on the Locomote Mid-Office System - an enterprise solution that handles travel and financial data.

As part of the leadership team - I helped grow Locomote to become a world leader in both technical excellence and product customer satisfaction.

Freelancer @ 500 Startups

05/2012 - 09/2012 | Remote

Helped work on Dashboard.io for 500 Startups. Built an ActiveRecord-based pub/sub library (https://github.com/fredwu/bustle) for Dashboard.io’s activity streams.

Engineering Manager @ SitePoint

12/2011 - 06/2012 | Melbourne, Australia

Lead a team of developers, designers and sysadmins to develop and maintain customer-facing and internal projects.

SitePoint.com is one of the earliest and most popular online education websites for web professionals and creatives.

Consultant @ reInteractive

10/2011 - 12/2011 | Melbourne, Australia

Ruby/Rails/JavaScript development for both client and internal projects (such as http://stillalive.com) in a small and lean team environment.

Some of my responsibilities include client communication, project speccing and estimation, design, front-end development, back-end development as well as deployment and maintenance.

Senior Engineer @ PlayUp

03/2011 - 10/2011 | Melbourne, Australia

Ruby (Rails and Padrino) and JavaScript (CoffeeScript + Backbone JS) development of cutting edge web applications, in an agile environment.

Worked in an R&D team that ran Kanban - researched and developed prototypes with varies technologies such as Apache Cassandra, MongoDB and AMQP (RabbitMQ), etc.

Worked in product teams that ran Scrum - took a legacy Rails codebase and improved it for new releases; worked on RESTful API web services that provided backend support for iOS and other mobile device applications; worked on a cutting edge flagship product using Ruby (Rack), CoffeeScript, Node.js, Backbone.js and XMPP.

Provided tech guidance and assistance to an internal mission critical service that ran on PHP and MySQL.

Software Engineer @ Envato

08/2009 - 03/2011 | Melbourne, Australia

Ruby application development - primarily Ruby on Rails.

PHP application development, with Wordpress stack development and maintenance.

Server environment (primarily Debian/Ubuntu) tuning and optimisation for sites in excess of 15 million pageviews a month.

Some of the projects I’ve developed and/or maintained are Tuts+, FreelanceSwitch, Creattica, Snipplr and an internal invoicing app.

Freelancer @ Frontier Media

07/2010 - 11/2010 | Melbourne, Australia

As an external consultant to help build ‘The Shed Online’ (http://www.theshedonline.org.au/) for the Beyond Blue organisation.

Kohana PHP framework was heavily used to power this social networking platform.

Software Engineer @ Trout Creative Thinking

06/2008 - 06/2009 | Melbourne, Australia

Primarily focused on PHP back-end development and front-end UI development.

From small scale projects using Kohana to medium scale projects using Yii to large scale projects using Zend Framework, I was responsible for the projects from the spec to launch.

Some of the clients we developed online solutions for include Reece, Adairs and Kenzo.

Software Engineer (Part Time, During University) @ Revium

01/2006 - 12/2007 | Melbourne, Australia

Some key responsibilities involved:

• W3C standard compliant HTML/CSS
• PHP development
• JavaScript development
• SEO

This was a part time role during uni.

Founder & System Admin (During High School) @ Mezoc

01/2002 - 12/2004 | Shanghai, China

Provided consumer-grade web hosting solutions. Maintained 3 servers in the USA and partnered with 2 servers in China. Administrated servers mainly using CentOS, Debian and FreeBSD. This was a side project during high school.

Another side project (ceased development) had spawned off, offering Linux/BSD education.

Co-Founder (During High School) @ Livedigi

01/2001 - 12/2002 | Shanghai, China

Livedigi was one of the most popular online electronic gadgets communities in China. It had over 10,000 members and many of its members were well known figures in the industry. This was a side project during high school.

Column Editor in Chief (During High School) @ 51digi

01/2000 - 12/2002 | Shanghai, China

Managed the PDA (Personal Digital Assistance) column; contributed reviews and other articles of PDA gadgets on a regular basis; and responsible for managing the online community. This was a part time role during high school.

First Website! @ Home

10/1997 | Shanghai, China

Built my first ever website using Microsoft FrontPage Express, on a Pentium 166Mhz computer, uploaded via a 33.6kbps modem.