Minh
Nguyen
a.k.a. Justin · Ho Chi Minh City & Hanoi, Vietnam
I've built software and led engineering teams for over 10 years. The largest org I've run was 40+ engineers at Zalo. The diagram shows what my teams built.
Director of Product, AI Assistant
VinSmart Future · Mar 2026 – Jun 2026
Led a 20-person team building an AI agent assistant for Vingroup's leadership: multi-agent, with memory, skills and decision support.
Read the full roleCareer
One bar per job, drawn to scale. Where bars overlap, the jobs did too.
Mar 2026 – Jun 2026
Hanoi, VietnamI led a 20-person team building an AI assistant for Vingroup's leadership, and owned the product side of it.
- The goal was a genuinely useful AI agent: one with memory and a set of skills it can call on.
- Designed it as a multi-agent system, with separate agents splitting up the work.
- Worked on decision support so the assistant could help leaders think through decisions.
About
I've been building software since 2012. I started with small PHP jobs for clients while I was still at university, and since then I've written the code, led the teams that write it, and lately owned the product decisions too.
Most of what I know I learned on systems that a lot of people depend on. At Zalo I built the ID Gateway that 20M+ people log in through every day, then ran two teams of 40+ engineers on the Mini App platform and social games. At that scale every outage is public, so I learned to put reliability first and features second.
The part I enjoy most is where product and engineering meet. At Bạn Uống Tôi Lái I sat with Biz and Ops, worked out what they actually needed, and rebuilt the platform in Go so it could keep up. At VinSmart Future a lot of my work was AI: agents with memory and skills, and coding agents that let a small team ship fast.
What I care about most is teams that understand what they're building. I spend a lot of my time coaching, and my best weeks are the ones where someone on the team can do something they couldn't do the week before.
Stack
What I work with, from managing people down to infrastructure.
- Leadership
- Team LeadershipMentorship
- Architecture
- System DesignSystem ArchitectureMicroservicesHigh Scalability
- Backend
- GoJavaNode.jsPostgres
- Frontend
- ReactVueNext.jsTypescript
- Infrastructure
- DockerKubernetes
- 2009 – 2013
Engineering Degree of Networking and TelecommunicationUIT - University of Information Technology- 2022
Leadership Development ProgramNUS - National University of Singapore
Writing
What I write about engineering and running teams.
- 31 Jan 2026Years of Experience vs. True Seniority of DevelopersYour career growth is entirely in your hands. The difference between a stagnant developer and a rapidly advancing one isn't years of experience, but a curious attitude that seeks to understand the 'why' behind every task.
- 15 May 2025What I look for when hiring junior developers: It's Not Just CodeLanding your first dev job isn't just about coding skills; hiring managers value problem-solving abilities, a proactive attitude, and strong communication. This post reveals the essential soft skills and learning mindset that will set you apart and boost your chances of getting hired.
Let's talk.
Email is the quickest way to reach me. I reply to direct questions, not to sales pitches.