Spencer Zeng Email & Phone Number

Toronto, ON, CA

Toronto, Ontario, Canada

• Otto is an everyday CRM that helps you engage your personal network by saving information with context and facilitating event scheduling. Think of it like Hubspot-lite + Calendly.
• As a founding engineer, built web apps across 3 domains: a portfolio management & surveying tool, a chat messenger client management tool, and a personal CRM & calendar, flexibly adapting to changing requirements.
• Architected a CRM-integrated calendar in React, supporting sharing availabilities, time zone handling, and rich-text meeting notes, iterating to incorporate functional and UX adjustments.
• Implemented backend business logic in a GraphQL API running on ExpressJS to sync events with Google Calendar, populate contacts from meeting attendees, identify meeting conflicts, and search across contacts and notes.
• Managed user feedback to prototype solutions, deconstruct features into actionable tasks, and prioritize them by effort-to-value, establishing a technical roadmap to strategically ship impactful features.
• Led technical hiring by creating job postings, interviewing, and managing 4 co-op students.Tech stack

Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada

• Trulioo is a global identity verification platform used by businesses to meet AML & KYC regulations, reduce fraud, and drive frictionless customer onboarding.
• Worked across the stack on an 8-developer team, updating web pages in React & vanilla HTML, server-side business logic, and MySQL database schemas, shipping features quickly to resolve customer pain points.
• Researched and built a prototype gRPC service in ASP.NET Core to investigate migrating a WCF service from.NET Framework, presenting results to the engineering department and demonstrating viability.
• Integrated data sources to the codebase in C# by reading vendor API documents to write client code for requests, server code to parse and normalize responses, and xUnit tests with 100% coverage to ensure correctness.
• Refactored an internal data normalization library used in every verification, separating unrelated code to increase cohesion and reducing LOC by ~30% (3k → 2k), improving the library’s maintainability.
• Created documentation for new developers explaining the code behind the verification process and how to resolve common issues when integrating new data sources, improving onboarding and knowledge transfer.

Greater Toronto Area, Canada

• Cancer produces an immunosuppressive microenvironment which blocks the effectiveness of many therapies. My work investigated whether a class of proteins called interferons drove immunosuppression in chronic lymphocytic.
• Purification and primary cell culture of CLL cells from patient blood samples.
• Western blotting, flow cytometry.
• Statistical analysis of data and creation of journal figures using GraphPad.Related publication: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28555083/

http://www.ysp.utoronto.ca/med

• Designed & presented daily science workshops for thirty high school students over a four-week summer program, inspiring a greater understanding and interest in life sciences.My responsibilities included:
• Preparation of pre & post-lab presentations to explain experimental concepts, as well as reagents and tools.
• Supervising students during experiments and addressing any questions they had.
• Discussing future career paths with students and participating in panel discussions.Rated by students in the program as having outstanding clarity, engagement, knowledge, and approachability.

Toronto, Ontario, Canada

Characterized transmembrane interactions of the HIV restriction factor tetherin.https://www.sickkids.ca/en/staff/s/simon-sharpe/

Toronto, Ontario, Canada

Investigated mechanisms of lipotoxicity-induced insulin resistance.https://physiology.utoronto.ca/faculty/adria-giacca

Toronto, Ontario, Canada

https://www.torontotransplantinstitute.ca/motsrtp.html

Master’S Degree (Attended), Cancer Immunology

Post Baccalaureate Diploma, Computer Science

Bachelor’S Degree, Immunology & Physiology