L

Leonard Tan

Engineering Leader & Technical Founder
🇸🇬 Singapore
it's just abstractions all the way down
8+
years experience
50M
end users served
8,200+
dApps powered
30M
monthly active wallets

About

Engineering leader, technical founder, and 0-to-1 product builder focused on AI agents and infrastructure. Currently Senior Engineering Director for Applied AI and Wallet Infrastructure at MetaMask, responsible for translating frontier model capabilities into deployable agent product systems, tool-calling workflows, secure execution frameworks, and evaluation systems.


A long-term, deep user of AI agent products for software development and daily work, well-versed in the Agent Loop, Tool Use, Reasoning/Planning, MCP, Memory, Prompt Engineering, and Context Engineering. Has strong judgment on model behavior, tool-call quality, context design, developer experience, and agent product usability.


Remains hands-on in R&D — personally building agent harnesses (Attobot, Dory) and native macOS applications (TouchFS, LocalWhisper). Languages: English, Mandarin Chinese.

Work

Senior Engineering Director Jun 2025 – Present
MetaMask · Applied AI & Wallet Infrastructure
  • Built agent evaluation framework measuring tool-call success, transaction safety, task-completion quality, latency, failure recovery, and model/tool interaction quality.
  • Designed and led agent wallet infrastructure from 0 to 1, enabling AI agents to securely execute financial operations — swaps, transactions, prediction-market interactions — for 30M+ monthly active users.
  • Technical product lead for ERC-8004, the open AI agent token standard advanced jointly with Google and the Ethereum Foundation, spanning 100+ ecosystem partners.
Co-Founder & CTO Oct 2018 – May 2025
Web3Auth · acquired by MetaMask
  • Built Web3Auth from scratch into production-grade authentication and wallet infrastructure — reaching $2M ARR, 9M+ monthly active users, and 8,200+ dApps.
  • Led 30+ person engineering organization spanning infrastructure, SDKs, wallet systems, and developer platforms.
  • Translated complex cryptography (secure multi-party computation) into developer-friendly experiences for customers including McDonald's, Nissan, Renault, and Fox.com.
Software Engineer Jun 2017 – Jun 2018
Visa
  • Developed and optimized payment-processing and loyalty-rewards platform software in a high-scale financial-services environment.

Projects

attobot
Complete agent harness in under 700 lines — minimal, readable, debuggable
dory
Long-running agent with built-in forgetting and context compression
touchfs
Touch ID-gated encrypted filesystem for macOS
ascii-screenshot
OCR + line detection for ASCII image rendering
llmproxy
Local LLM proxy with request logging and routing
erc-8004
Registry contracts for the ERC-8004 agent identity standard

Core Competencies

Agent Harness R&D Tool-Call Evaluation Context Engineering Model–Harness Alignment 0-to-1 Product Building Developer Experience Wallet Infrastructure Secure Execution Multi-Agent Systems Protocol Design Open Source Web3 / Crypto

Education

Singapore Management University
Double degree in Economics & Business Management (Finance) · Summa Cum Laude · 2013–2017
Lee Kong Chian Scholarship
Hack Reactor
Advanced Software Engineering Immersive · 2016