Spill The T: Seeing Tech Through a New Lens
Spill The T: Seeing Tech Through a New Lens
In this series, we take you behind the scenes to what it’s like to be a part of Team Temasek. Hear why we love doing what we do from interns who have learnt the ropes, mid-career joiners who have made the switch from other industries, and those who have risen within our ranks.
Teo Sze Lee used to spend his days documenting stories of love with his Digital SLR camera. But increasingly, free pockets of time found the wedding photographer at the library, tracking advancements in computer vision or taking courses in data science and machine learning on Coursera, Kaggle, or YouTube.
It was the cusp of 2018, when AI was growing in influence and 5G had begun its rollout, heralding a new era for cloud computing. As the world of technology heated up, his passion for his day job cooled. A software engineer in his “past life”, he knew he needed to refocus and find a way back into a field he missed.
“I was still a tech geek at my core, and everything from software engineering to machine learning had moved so far from traditional approaches. It seemed like magic,” remembers Sze Lee, now an Assistant Vice President with Temasek’s Technology team.
It was a world apart from the five years he felt “stuck” developing Windows applications in the late 2000s. The Cloud and mobile apps had not yet taken off, and life as a professional photographer seemed more appealing.
Now, the possibilities seemed endless.
The big switch
Fate conspired to help with the leap. He scored a gig with a company combining AI with drone technology and went on to take one of the top spots in a nationwide data science competition. The win bolstered his confidence enough for him to show up at Temasek’s recruitment drive in April 2019.
It was the first held by the newly formed Technology team, and both the recruitment ad and its online blogs promised that age, gender, and educational background mattered less than “attitude… and real-world ability”, allaying Sze Lee’s concerns about his seven-year resume “gap”.
Reading about how Temasek planned to use the promise of data science to benefit both its teams and the community, whether through investment decisions or mentoring social impact startups, was the clincher.
“I saw an opportunity to grow,” says Sze Lee. “I didn’t want to just be optimising e-commerce platforms. This would be more than just a job – I could make an impact.”
Temasek took a chance on him. In June 2019, he kicked off a one-year contract to learn the ropes as a Machine Learning Engineer.
It was a diverse team, he recalls, with colleagues drawn from the public sector, banking, and even startups. What they shared was a love for technology, unique perspectives, and the desire to make a difference – Sze Lee fit right in.
He hit the ground running, learning to analyse data sets, and then to enhance search applications with machine learning, figuring out how to squeeze months of research in days or hours.
Mistakes were embraced as learning opportunities by the team, and he got used to asking for help with concepts he could not grasp. “I quickly realised that not everyone knew everything. If someone had a question, they asked. No one is embarrassed about not knowing something – even when it feels like the answer should be obvious.”
The team, by its very nature, was about experimentation, he says. They worked iteratively, going back and forth with the investment teams to devise and implement tools that would help them work better and faster.
“It’s not like someone asks for a solution and we deliver some code,” says Sze Lee. “They tell us the problem, and we suggest an approach for them to try. If it works, we build it out some more.
“Through those conversations, we understand what the other does, and how we can help.”
Zooming in on purpose
It didn’t take long for Sze Lee to realise the impact he craved when he joined. Early on, he had worked with the Life Sciences team on automating part of the research process. That ability to pull out, classify and put together relevant data proved critical in early 2020, when Temasek’s wide-ranging response to the pandemic necessitated quick decision-making.
By June that year, Temasek had invested in the effort to develop a COVID-19 vaccine.
“During COVID, Temasek was able to make a big difference, and I had a small part to play in that. It’s something I am really proud of.”
That same month, Sze Lee landed a full-time position and moved up in the organisation as he sought out more ways to “build bridges” between technology and applications relevant to Temasek’s goals. He is currently part of the team working on Winnow, an AI-driven platform that filters internal and external data, insights and intelligence on the investments Temasek is considering, and presents a unified view of risks and opportunities, as well as Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) factors, to ensure alignment with Temasek’s sustainability objectives.
Sze Lee is diligent about keeping himself updated on the latest technology trends, particularly those at the intersection of business and technology, both online and offline.
“There are always new products, new use cases, new buzzwords, like everything that’s happened with ChatGPT just in the last year,” he says. “We spend a lot of our time staying up to date with what people are talking and thinking about, and analysing whether it will help solve problems or create new ones.”
It provides a constant stream of challenges that makes Sze Lee sure that he is exactly where he wants to be.
“I have been here five years and I’ll probably be here for the next five – or more, doing something completely different. That’s how it is in a company that’s open to change – you just keep moving. You never feel stuck.”
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