Co-founder & CTO, MyRumahBaru · Kuala Lumpur
Ching Yaw Hao
I build consumer and marketplace products. Ten years in — five of them as the first engineer and later Head of Engineering at a proptech startup that grew to RM266M GDV — I now lead product, engineering and AI at MyRumahBaru, which I co-founded in 2024.
Ten years, four addresses. Each pin is a chapter of the story below.
Now · MyRumahBaru · 2024–
Sarah, in production
We started MyRumahBaru in April 2024 and raised a USD 200K pre-seed. The team built the product from zero; I own product engineering, geospatial infrastructure and our production LLM agent systems.
Sarah — the AI property advisor on myrumahbaru.com. Buyers say what they want in plain language; she asks before recommending, remembers the whole conversation, and turns matches into viewings with verified agents. LangGraph, BullMQ, Redis and Postgres/PostGIS.
Scripted demo. The real Sarah runs on myrumahbaru.com.
The story · 2015–
Each move was the next thing to learn
I make career decisions on one question: where will I grow fastest?
University on the map — Hackathons and open source were how I tested whether my skills held up outside coursework. A research assistantship at UTAR's MIMOS Lab, building the front end for DeepWood with FRIM, was the first time my code had real users.
MoneyLion 2017–2018 · on the map — I joined to learn how an engineering team actually works: agile process, code review, shipping inside a large production codebase.
Didian 2018–2024 · on the map — The next step was building a product from the ground up. As the first engineering hire I chose the stack, owned the product, ran the analytics and iterated on what the numbers said. By the end: five and a half years, a team of six, RM266M GDV, around 300 agents.
- RM266MGDV on the platform we built at Didian
- ~300agents served across Malaysia
- 5½ yrsfirst engineer → Head of Engineering
MyRumahBaru 2024– · on the map — After owning someone else's product, the only thing left to learn was building a company from nothing. Everything before this was practice for it.
Also at MyRumahBaru
Under the hood
- Lead funnel — rebuilt with server-side conversion attribution and appointment instrumentation; traced failed appointments back to listing staleness and drove the data-quality work that followed.
- Geospatial layer — self-hosted map tiles (MapLibre, Protomaps/PMTiles) and a Nominatim instance for Malaysian address geocoding.
- Search — multilingual (EN/MS/ZH) semantic search over listings on pgvector/HNSW embeddings.
Recognition
Awards
- e27 Luminaries 2021 — Breakthrough
- hack2hired 2017 — 1st runner-up, main hack; winner, mini and warm-up hacks
- e-Genting Programming Competition 2015 — Merit
Side project: Ai Chan Chatbot
Working with
Stack
TypeScript · React, React Native, Flutter · Node.js · PostgreSQL, PostGIS, pgvector · Redis, BullMQ · MapLibre, Protomaps, Nominatim, OpenStreetMap · LangGraph, MCP · DigitalOcean, AWS