Employee Spotlight: Stephen Hu, Senior Director, Engineering
Stephen Hu is a highly experienced software engineer with more than 23 years in the industry. He’s an expert at creating top-notch distributed, scalable services for cloud storage and applications. Educated in the US where he received his Bachelors of Science in Computer Engineering at Georgia Tech, Stephen has spent the past 16 years building and leading world-class engineering teams in Asia. Currently, Stephen leads the China-based division of Wish’s engineering team, reporting to Wish’s US-based CTO, Jerry Louis. Stephen’s team in China supports Wish’s worldwide logistics platform, responsible for delivering millions of packages to customers in 60 countries. Keep reading to discover Stephen’s inspiring journey, valuable career lessons, perspective on critical skills for engineers, and his tips for building successful teams
Talk about your career path into ecommerce and what drew you to Wish?Most of my experience has been in enterprise technology, cloud services and distributed storage to be specific. I had a brief stint in the video game/metaverse technology industry (Improbable) and ecommerce many years ago at Walmart.com. But, at the end of the day, what makes me tick is applying technology to different problem spaces and that’s probably because of my engineering background–I’m a problem solver. Ecommerce is actually a pretty old industry if you think about it; it has been around for roughly 30 years, but surprisingly it’s still a fast growing and thriving industry! The technology necessary to handle the scale, efficiency, and new user requirements is still a very interesting and challenging problem space. There are lots of new areas where technology can be applied to make the experience better and more interesting for customers and merchants. Lastly, the people that interviewed me and that I work with day to day are some of the smartest people in the industry and that pushes me even harder.
What do you enjoy most about your role?
At Wish, the decisions you make and the things that you do can have a huge impact on the company direction. Every single person can make a significant difference. I’ve worked for companies with 30,000–100,000 employees and you’re limited in the things that you can do just based on the sheer scale. As a leader, one of the things I enjoy the most is enabling and empowering people and teams to make a difference.
You have now been here for a little over a year, what are some accomplishments you’re most proud of?
There have been a lot of project milestones over the past year, but my biggest accomplishment, in my opinion, has been the building out of the teams. This includes finding the right talent, developing them, and delivering on milestones. Taking on the logistics platforms where we’re serving millions of requests per day is quite exciting!
What are some of the best career lessons you have learned so far?Persistence and resilience have always been things that have guided me in my career. There are always challenges and hardships to deal with, but those experiences are really the things that mold you, so don’t avoid those challenges. Instead, embrace them as they will help you to become stronger. I worked at a large enterprise company for almost 10 years and had coincidentally changed managers 11 times; that means that each year I had a new manager. There’s a lot of effort involved in building trust, understanding styles, different personalities, aligning goals, and rebuilding credibility. Each time there’s a new manager, it mostly starts over from scratch, but with each interaction, I learned different things, the good with the bad, and that has been foundational in my management training.
What advice do you have for those wanting to join technical leadership roles here at Wish? What do you look for when hiring?
Technical leadership is one of those areas where I think there’s constantly a need for more. Technical leaders need to have the experience, instincts, and savvy to navigate through all the difficult challenges, pick the ones that have the most significant impact, go through the trade off analysis because there’s always a tradeoff, and influence people that don’t report directly to them or buy into their expertise to move in a certain direction. Needless to say, the experience, not just in terms of depth, but breadth, the ability to analyze, communicate, and influence are very critical for these types of roles. Technical leaders with the experience, technical chops, and soft skills that I mentioned above are obviously things that I look for in these roles. But one thing that I think is underrated is the ability to identify the things that need to be done, take the initiative to drive these things, and not just wait to be handed these things — that’s really a big part of leadership, whether technical or non-technical, identify what must be done and how to get others to follow you to get it done.
What key skills are important for engineers to have?
Stating the obvious here, but a good computer science or equivalent engineering background is critical. In addition, other important skills are ability to learn quickly, communicate effectively, and I think intellectual curiosity is often overlooked. Do you spend your free time learning about new technologies, are you working on open source projects during the weekends, or do you like learning about all that great new technology? I think this tells me a lot about the engineer’s interest in the field which correlates to whether or not this person’s going to have a long and distinctive career in this area. Sure, everyone’s busy outside of work, but if you really enjoy working with technology, you’ll make time for it.
What are your favorite hobbies outside of work?
My hobbies are wide and ranging, but they seem to have changed over the years. I used to be extremely active playing sports like basketball, but over the years due to the aggressive nature of the game I haven’t done it as much. I’m a huge fan of the NBA and this goes back to the Lakers and Celtics rivalries back in 1986 that I used to watch with my father. Ironically, the first time I heard about Wish was seeing their light blue logo on the Lakers jersey.
With family commitments and less and less free time, I’ve had to mold my hobbies more towards things where I can spend small spurts of time at random intervals. For example, while I’m taking my daughter to ballet practice, I’ll typically pick up a book to read (history, management, leadership, fiction, etc). I enjoy traveling with my family around the world and there’s definitely a large backlog for places to visit so hopefully that can start back in earnest soon.
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