AARON GAO

高俊凱 · CHUN-KAI GAO · TAIPEI, TAIWAN

Aaron Gao

Department Manager at Taiwan Mobile — leading a ~30-person cross-national R&D team across Taiwan and Indonesia, at the intersection of telecom digital transformation and applied AI.

I came up as a builder and never stopped shipping. Now I use AI to keep building — at the scale of a team and an organization.

Aaron Gao (高俊凱)

01 ABOUT

Builder at origin. Leader at scale.

My work is the engineering discipline that turns research-grade capability into production infrastructure — at carrier scale.

Admitted to NYCU’s computer-science graduate program through Taiwan’s special-selection track — seven students a year, selected on shipped systems rather than exam scores. Career since: banking, civic technology, carrier-scale infrastructure.

02 SELECTED WORK

Four systems, shipped.

CASE 01 Team Lead · Civic Technology

WayFic — Civic Emergency Routing

Challenge
Ambulances lose critical minutes at congested Taipei intersections. The agencies that could fix it — fire department, traffic control, private navigation providers — each held one piece of the picture, and no single entity had the mandate to integrate them.
Build
Led team WayFic at the 2020 Taiwan Presidential Hackathon to build an ambulance-routing proof of concept, with guidance from Audrey Tang. Briefed President Tsai Ing-wen at the nationally televised finals. Open-sourced the result.
Impact
Top 10 nationwide. Two years later, the Institute of Transportation (MOTC) cited the project by name in its national smart-transportation research report — carrying the team’s projection of up to 1,855 additional lives saved each year.
Aaron Gao, holding the event microphone, presents team WayFic at the 2020 Taiwan Presidential Hackathon finals; President Tsai Ing-wen sits in the audience.
FINALS, 2020 — Briefing President Tsai Ing-wen on WayFic’s ambulance-routing proof of concept.
  • Civic tech
  • Routing
  • Open source
  • Government citation
CASE 02 Founding Engineer & Architect

M+ Meet — Real-Time Communication Platform

Challenge
Build a telecom-grade conferencing platform for one of Taiwan’s largest carriers — from first commit to something the whole enterprise runs on.
Build
Architect from inception: multi-protocol delivery — WebRTC for interactive sessions, RTMP and HLS for mass broadcast — with real-time chat at scale over WebSockets, then a WebRTC re-architecture of the media layer. Later led a cross-border Taiwan–Indonesia team on low-latency live-broadcast architecture.
Impact
Nine months from inception to enterprise-wide deployment. Two granted invention patents (co-inventor). The re-architecture cut large-meeting latency toward real time while reducing infrastructure cost.
  • WebRTC
  • RTMP
  • HLS
  • WebSockets
  • Media architecture
CASE 03 Technical Lead

Carrier-Grade Voice Service

Challenge
Deliver high-availability VoIP at telecom grade — and hand it to operations so completely that it runs without its builders.
Build
Extended a telecom-grade open-source softswitch at the source-code level: protocols, media handling, call routing. Designed an active-standby architecture with cloud load balancing, ran failure-mode analysis, and wrote the incident-response playbook.
Impact
A high-availability voice service delivered with a full handoff to operations — architecture, failure modes, and playbook included.
  • VoIP
  • Open-source softswitch
  • Active-standby
  • Cloud load balancing
  • Incident response
CASE 04 Program Lead

Voice Intelligence, Edge to Cloud

Challenge
Turn raw in-store audio into actionable intelligence — one pipeline crossing software, hardware, acoustics, and AI.
Build
Defined the need on site with retail operations, then worked first-principles from materials and components up to system architecture: microphone arrays, embedded audio capture, edge-cloud partitioning, and AI analysis — through to field deployment. Also built automatic transcription and speech-recognition efficiency optimization that lets the same resources serve more concurrent sessions.
Impact
Disclosed as a Major R&D Achievement in the company’s 2025 Annual Report — and the platform now seeds ongoing research collaboration on robotic auditory perception.
  • Microphone array
  • Acoustics
  • Edge compute
  • ASR
  • Field deployment

03 FOCUS AREAS

What I focus on now.

Moving the organization from supporting platforms to owning AI product lines and repeatable enterprise-delivery frameworks.

Workspace governance, knowledge governance, and department-wide capability baselines — so AI enters critical systems as governed infrastructure, not improvised pilots.

Driving AI across the software lifecycle by leading through doing — reusable agent and skill modules the whole team builds on.

Moving between developer, systems architect, and program manager — AI keeps me close to the work as the organization grows.

Developing engineers into technical program managers, across borders and cultures — leadership grounded in nonviolent communication.

04 TIMELINE

The trajectory so far.

  1. 2018–2020
    Freelance full-stack developer

    Built a digital learning platform used by a university business program — 1,000+ users while still a student.

  2. 2020
    Taiwan Presidential Hackathon — Top 10

    Led team WayFic’s ambulance-routing system to the nationally televised finals — see Case 01.

  3. BANKING
    Software engineer, DBS Bank

    Shipped an interbank microservice in two months, working with teams across Singapore and India — regulated-industry engineering before telecom.

  4. 2022
    Joined Taiwan Mobile as principal engineer

    Founding engineer and architect of M+ Meet — enterprise-wide within nine months.

  5. 2022–2026
    Three promotions in under four years

    Principal engineer → senior principal engineer → assistant manager → department manager.

  6. NOW
    Department Manager, Taiwan Mobile

    Leads a ~30-person cross-national R&D organization across Taiwan and Indonesia — AI product lines, AI governance, AI-assisted delivery.

05 CREDENTIALS

On the record.

Patents
Two granted invention patents (co-inventor) in real-time video conferencing, Taiwan Mobile. TWI866435B ↗ TWI866239B ↗
Publication
Peer-reviewed chapter (co-author), IntechOpen. doi:10.5772/intechopen.89376 ↗
Education
M.S., Computer Science — National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University (NYCU); admitted through Taiwan’s portfolio-based special-selection track.
Hackathon
Top 10, 2020 Taiwan Presidential Hackathon (team WayFic) — proof-of-concept mentored by Audrey Tang, released as open source. Cited two years later in a research report by the Institute of Transportation, Ministry of Transportation and Communications. Official results ↗ Finalist video ↗ MOTC-IOT report 2022 ↗
Teaching
Guest lecturer on career development, Soochow University.

06 WHAT’S NEXT — CONTACT

What’s next.

Scaling AI product lines from prototype to production — and building the technical program leaders who deliver them.

The work I care most about extends carrier-grade real-time infrastructure to AI agents — run as governed infrastructure, with the discipline critical systems require.

aaron@aronk.io
LINKEDIN ↗ GITHUB ↗