Marika Lam

Hi, I'm Marika Lam

Senior Software Engineer

- E-MAIL
- marikaleelam@gmail.com
- LINKEDIN
- www.linkedin.com/in/marikalam

- www.github.com/marikalam

- www.allaboutcode.medium.com

Hello and welcome to my page! My name is Marika Lam and I'm a Senior Software Engineer at Walmart Global Tech, based in the Silicon Valley. I lead engineering for Walmart's Promotions and Coupons platform and am building PromoGenie, an agentic AI platform that uses Claude and RAG-based retrieval to streamline promotion and coupon workflows. Before Walmart, I graduated from Boston University and worked at Rakuten in San Mateo.

In my free time, I enjoy yoga, playing tennis, cooking and anything that requires being outdoors. I also love writing tutorials and articles on my personal Medium page. You can see some of my projects under the "Projects" section.

May 2021 - current

Walmart Global Tech

Senior Software Engineer

• Lead engineering efforts for Walmart's Promotions and Coupons platform, building internal products that enable business teams to create, manage, and execute promotions across 11 international and U.S. markets.
• Serve as a tech lead for full-stack initiatives, driving architecture, design reviews, implementation, and modernization of promotion-management experiences using React, TypeScript/JavaScript, Java, Python, Node.js, REST APIs, and distributed backend services.
• Develop PromoGenie, an agentic AI platform that streamlines promotion and coupon workflows using LLMs, Claude, Python, TypeScript, ChromaDB, vector search, and RAG-based retrieval.
• Partner with product managers, backend engineers, platform teams, and business stakeholders to translate complex promotion rules and operational requirements into scalable product and technical solutions.
• Provide architectural guidance and technical leadership across the team, mentoring engineers, reviewing designs and code, and driving engineering standards for maintainability, performance, testing, and developer experience.
• Built automated end-to-end and API testing frameworks using Playwright and Nightwatch.js, expanding coverage across the Promotions UI and 30+ REST APIs.
• Worked on backend and data engineering for the Promotions platform, building services with Java, Spring MVC, REST APIs, Oracle, and Cassandra.

April 2017 - May 2021

Walmart Global Tech

Software Engineer III

Worked as a backend Java and database engineer on the Promotions platform before transitioning into a full-stack role, building RESTful services with Java, Spring MVC, Oracle, and Cassandra.

May 2015 - April 2017

Rakuten

Software Engineer

Worked on back-end infrastructure and services of the Ecosystem Department and Membership team by creating scalable APIs to be used by clients and its subsidiaries: RESTful web services (Java, Spring, Cassandra, RabbitMQ); batch processing and migration from Oracle to Cassandra (Scala, Spark, Java, Python); integration, unit and performance tests (Cucumber, JUnit, Gatling); development process organization (Confluence, Jira, Jenkins, Git); and code reviews and quality control (Git, Atlassian Stash, Jira). Worked at the Tokyo Headquarters office in 2015.

March 2014 - Dec 2014

Lubax

Software Engineer

Lubax is a smartphone-based clinical reference to identify skin lesions. The user takes a photo of a skin lesion and the app will search a proprietary image database of diagnosed lesions to identify a diagnosis. CBIR (content based image recognition) is used to discriminate skin-lesion types. I data mined 15,000+ image files of skin diseases for the iOS platform in Java and Python, and designed and developed the iOS app using Objective-C, C++, and the XCode IDE.

Dec 2011 - Sept 2013

Boston University

Assistant Database Administrator

Retrieved endowment-related data from DARWIN (Development and Alumni Relations Web-Based Information Network) database. Analyzed and validated reports before sending to sales and marketing, revenues, and other departments.

Oct 2016

Vegas Money2020 Hackathon

PowerPay

Credit cards costs 2.9% and paying online directly using bank account doesn't work because there is no real-time verification of payment. So, we created a website that authenticates the payer and make the payment using a digital checks from their bank account using Flask Framework, Python, HTML/CSS/Javascript, Heroku.and Feedzai API.
Project page

Sept 2016

US Bank/Mastercard Small Business Hackathon Finalists

4Sight

4Sight is web application that creates an adaptive cashflow forecasting tool for small business to better manage working capital using Flask Framework, Python and HTML/CSS/Javascript.
Project page

Jul 2016

One Traction AR/VR Hackathon Finalists

Tolen

Tolen is an an augmented reality online review market. Our solution is to create basically a Virtual Reality Yelp along with the environement view and the menu's associated with their dishes. Tolen offers
1. A clickable menu of the restaurant to view dishes as holograms.
2. 360 degrees video of the restaurant.
3. For restaurants to showcase their dishes as holograms to the customers before they order their food.
Therefore restaurants and users can give better impressions of their best-rated dishes.
Project page

Sept 2016

Rakuten Hackathon Finalists

Roomz

Roomz is an iOS app that checks availability, books and cancels meeting rooms in the office. The primary tools used for this product is XCode IDE, Swift and the Microsoft Outlook API.
Project page

Sept 2016

Changi Airport Hackathon

Changi Along The Way

Changi Along The Way a website that allows passengers to be able to accurately predict amount of time it takes to get to your destination, along with personalized list of places along the way to your gate.
Project page

Dec 2014

Boston University

BUSale

BUsale is a free college marketplace that allows any Instagram user to sell a second hand item or service by using the hashtag "busale" in the caption of an Instagram post. Users can conveniently sell items via their Instagram account and buy items via our website. This project incorporates external use of the Instagram API, MySQL, and MVC web app implementation in PHP.

Aug 2014

Boston University Medical School

Boston University Finding Information Framework

FIF is the first iOS app created for the Boston University School of Medicine. It is a medical education app to help reinforce skills to uncover resources related to Evidence Based Medicine. Tools used include Objective C, Balsamiq Wireframing Tool, XCode IDE, Github, TestFlight Beta Testing. The iOS app (search BUSM Finding Information Framework) is available in the App store!
Product page