Samuel Tin

Solutions Architect with 21+ years of experience spanning traditional enterprise technology, cloud computing, and Generative AI, with deep domain expertise in banking and insurance. Proven track record of delivering measurable business impact, including an insurance chatbot for Zurich Spain that reduced contact centre workload by 50%, a conversational AI platform deployed across AXA Hong Kong and the Philippines, and an internet banking modernisation at Oracle/CITIC Bank that increased concurrent user capacity by 60%. Combines software engineering rigour with deep insurance and banking domain knowledge to architect AI solutions that ship to production.

Driven by a genuine curiosity for AI and a desire to apply it to problems that have real business impact.

Independent AI Study - Career Break / Independent AI Study - UK

(2025-04)

• Deepened Azure AI Foundry expertise through hands-on project work, building and publishing three open-source insurance AI projects on GitHub covering agentic workflows, hierarchical RAG pipelines, and FAQ chatbots
• Completed Azure AI Engineer Associate (AI-102) and Azure Administrator Associate (AZ-104) certifications
• Published LinkedIn thought leadership articles on RAG chunking strategies, hybrid search, and agentic AI architecture

Solution Architect - Insurance Business Application (IBA) Limited - UK

(2021-08 - 2025-04)

• Delivered end-to-end solution architecture for two production insurance SaaS implementations: Zurich Spain (motor) and RSA UK (pet), covering policy lifecycle, underwriting rules, and claims processing on the IBSuite platform.
• Architected and delivered enterprise RAG-based Generative AI solutions on Azure AI Foundry (insurance FAQ assistant, semantic document search), spanning document ingestion, chunking, hybrid search, embedding, and response generation using Azure OpenAI and LangChain, decreasing contact centre workload by 50%
• Collaborated with customer technical teams to integrate their frontend applications with the IBA SaaS API, guiding them on API usage to ensure customer success and adoption
• Established governance, coding standards, and CI/CD automation using GitHub Actions, reducing reported bugs by 20% within six months.

Technical Architect - Emperor Financial Service Group - Hong Kong

(2020-05 - 2020-10)

• Led the application architecture for FX and Bullion Margin Financial Trading platforms, including pricing engines, news feed engines, and websites using Java and C#.
• Played a key role in the cloud migration from Alibaba Cloud to Azure for financial platforms, collaborating with stakeholders to deliver technical requirements, cost and effort estimation.

Solution Architect - AXA Limited - Hong Kong

(2019-04 - 2020-05)

• Architected a scalable regional enterprise conversational AI platform (Emma By AXA) on Azure, delivering 30% development cost savings on second region deployment, owning end-to-end solution architecture from concept through production, including security controls, AI governance alignment, and cloud-native deployment design.
• Led a 10-member offshore team across Hong Kong and the Philippines, mentoring developers in NLP pipeline patterns and conversational AI best practice, building team capability and self-sufficiency alongside delivery.
• Designed and integrated conversational AI platform with enterprise backend systems including CRM, policy administration, and authentication services, across multiple channels and two country deployments.
• Engaged with senior business stakeholders to align AI capability roadmap with enterprise strategy, translating business requirements into pragmatic, governed AI architecture decisions across multiple country deployments.

Tech Lead - Clare.AI Limited (rebranded as Wati) - Hong Kong

(2018-11 - 2019-03)

AI Chatbot Startup, Hong Kong

• Mentored a team of three developers in building a scalable AI chatbot product.

Software Architect - Kami Intelligent Limited - Hong Kong

(2017-07 - 2018-06)

AI chatbot startup, Hong Kong

• Led NLP data engineering and model development, building Chinese word embeddings, POS tagging, and NER pipelines using TensorFlow, and designing a dialogue labelling data pipeline using MongoDB and Node.js.

Senior WebLogic Consultant - Oracle Consulting Services - Hong Kong

(2012-06 - 2016-06)

Contract (via Oracle Consulting)

• Deployed onsite at CITIC Bank as an Oracle Consulting resource, providing independent technical leadership within a major regulated financial institution.
• Led the Mobile Banking Platform delivery, implementing Fund Transfer, Bill Payment, and Stock Trading.
• Architected the Internet Banking Platform migration to WebLogic Portal 10.3.6, increasing concurrent user capacity by 60%; designed high-availability server topology and disaster recovery plan, including live DR testing and production fallback strategies.

Software Architect & Developer — Financial Services - Earlier Career - Hong Kong

(2002-06 - 2017-07)

Prior to specialising in AI architecture, built a 15-year foundation in enterprise software delivery across regulated financial services in Asia. At ITApps Limited, designed and led delivery of a Java/J2EE CRM product for banks across the region, managing a team of five to six developers. At UBS Wealth Management, led offshore development teams across Hong Kong and China delivering Order Capture, Portfolio Management, and CRM systems.

At UBS Investment Banking, developed enhancements to the Global Market Risk Management System and designed a Cash Movement Tracking Engine that reduced manual data entry by 90% across equity derivatives trading operations. Independent freelance projects (2016–2017) included a Photo OCR system built using Python and Keras, marking the transition into AI-focused delivery.

BSc - Computing and Information Systems - University of London (1998-09 - 2002-06)