Interview with Mong Suan Yee, Engineering Director at COSS.io

Hello Mong, thanks for having me!

How did you end up working for COSS? Did they contact you or did you reply to a job offer?

Mong Suan Yee:

I was interested in blockchain technology already a year ago when I was working in Malaysia. I then came to Singapore for another job, but I was already part of the blockchain community. Then Dave Appleton, who knows Rune too, introduced us. I started talking with Rune who offered me the job, and I thought the position was interesting, so I took the job!

You have a very impressive C.V, can you tell us about your work at BLoyalty and MyRepublic, was it similar to what you will be doing here, at COSS?

Mong Suan Yee:

BLoyalty is the biggest loyalty website in Malaysia. So, it provides a loyalty platform for companies like Starbucks, 7-Eleven and so on. I started working there as a contractor, but eventually, I got hired as a CTO. They did not have a software or engineering team, so I came in to build the team from scratch.

It is similar because both businesses have scaling issues. Loyalty is actually quite similar to currency — it has points, it has security issues.

How would you define your job at COSS, what does your typical day look like?

Mong Suan Yee:

Right now I’m getting familiar with the way they work and looking at what needs to be improved. I also look at how we are going to scale in terms of resources, in terms of team and in terms of technology.

Right now, I’m doing a lot of core review, looking at the architecture of the current engine. There is also a list of issues that I’m working on solving, for instance: ’Why can’t I get my 2FA to work?”

Things like that.

Rune told me on Monday that you have free hands to hire a team of devs. It should be a team of 6 or 7 in-house. Do you already have contacts with some of them? Do you already know what kind of profiles you are looking for?

Mong Suan Yee:

I had meetings with lots of recruitment agencies. We need a few skillsets. We need three back-end engineers. I want to get a back-end architect, a senior and a junior.

We also need a dev-ops, his role is to ensure that our servers are functioning properly. He must make sure that they can scale. He also takes care of maintaining the tools we use and has a big role in security.

He will need to look at the traffic and scale everything accordingly.

On top of that, we are looking for one UI/UX engineer and two front-end engineers. So that will be a team of 7.

When do you expect them to start?

Mong Suan Yee:

I think in about a month because their notice period should be a month. I’d say between one and two months to get the whole team here.

Are you still improving the current engine and user interface?

Mong Suan Yee:

Yes, as we speak, the team is correcting some issues and implementing new features, both for the engine and the UI. We cannot afford to stop doing it. The two most important things for me are security and the ability to cope with the traffic. We see a lot of new users coming in, and it’s almost exponential. The current engine architecture could probably cope for a while, but we need to rearchitect it to be able to scale up. It’s like Legos — we need to be able to create new instances of services. Let’s say you have a wallet service, right now there is only one instance of it, we need to create more instances to be able to cope with more traffic and users. We need to rearchitect to be able to do it.

When do you expect the UI to be the way you want it to be?

Mong Suan Yee:

In my opinion, it’s never perfect, and there is always room for improvement. Right now, on the current engine and UI, we are solving a bit less than one issue a day. My goal is to improve the speed at which we can fix those issues. We are currently making a priority list of those issues, to see which ones are the most important to solve first. My role is also to build the team so that we can get rid of those issues as soon as possible.

How long will it take for the new engine to be ready?

Mong Suan Yee:

To be honest, building a new engine from scratch would take a long time, probably close to 6 months. But we can build with what we already have which will be much faster. We can work in stages and replace what we have step by step. We call that refactoring. By doing so we would be able to release improvements regularly. Our architecture right now is based on services, and we can easily replace them one by one. That is the best solution in my opinion.

I’m still doing my evaluation, so we’ll see which solution we decide upon.

What experience do you have when it comes to building engines from scratch?

Mong Suan Yee:

I’ve done it for a few companies. It’s very challenging, which is why we need a good back-end architect in the team. In my job for BLoyalty I, and the team I was managing, built an engine able to cope with 5 million users.

Will the API be released at the same time as the engine? I know a lot of people are excited about it, because it allows bots to trade on the exchange which brings some volume in.

Mong Suan Yee:

We must be very careful with security, which is why we can’t release everything. We need to prioritize, for instance, before releasing the API, we need to get the FIAT. It’s not our top priority right now.

What volume do you think the new engine will be able to handle?

Mong Suan Yee:

It depends on the design. As I said earlier, at BLoyalty the engine my team and I built needed to handle 5 million users. I think 5 million is close to what Binance has, that is what we are aiming for.

So, just to be perfectly clear, at BLoyalty, you built the team, and then you and the team designed an engine which was able to handle 5 million users?

Mong Suan Yee:

Yes, maybe those users were not as active as users on a cryptocurrency exchange. But yes, we could definitely cope with 5 million users with that engine.

How do you ensure the exchange is secured? What kind of testing do you do? Will there be one person in the team specifically in charge of security?

Mong Suan Yee:

We are talking to a few companies to do penetration tests for us. Some companies provide services called ‘co-review’, they look at our architecture and assess it. I think it will be part of the compliance that we will have to submit to MAS.

I specifically conveyed it to the recruitment agencies, that the back-end architect and the dev-ops have security as part of their skillset.

Security is something we are actively looking into. I want things to be perfect, and as many evaluations, in terms of security, as possible.

Will margin trading be available on the engine?

Mong Suan Yee:

I’m not making those decisions.

Anything you’d like to say before we stop the interview?

Mong Suan Yee:

Right now we are still in stage 1, which is building the core in-house team. But I see a lot of things we can do in the future. We will have integration with merchants, a mobile app. I have experience in mobile apps, and I think that would help our growth! There are so many exciting things we can do at COSS, and that is why I decided to join the project. It’s a very nice challenge, if it weren’t that dynamic, I would not have taken the job. There is so much room for growth!

Thank you so much for your time!