Frank Zhang

Principal Software Engineer at Microsoft · Dynamics 365 Commerce · Ex-startup founding tech lead

Frank Zhang

For 11 years I've built systems that move money and orders — from a 0→1 consumer lending platform in Southeast Asia to the transaction core of Dynamics 365 Commerce, serving retailers worldwide. Having worked in the US, Singapore and China, I know these markets first-hand and lead engineering teams across borders — and I believe AI agents are reshaping how engineers work.

Frank Zhang
11+
years in software engineering
7
years on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Commerce
2
startups led 0→1 as tech lead
3
countries worked in: US · Singapore · China

Selected projects & impact

Tech lead / Architect

Lets a business buyer sign in once and order on behalf of multiple organizations or outlets: contact identity model, on-behalf-of authorization, account association, cart/order ownership, data migration and staged rollout, including headless storefronts.

  • ▸Publicly documented on Microsoft Learn and listed in the 2026 Wave 1 release plan
  • ▸Delivered across companies, platform areas and multiple releases
Dynamics 365 CommerceB2BIdentity & AuthorizationDistributed Systems

Copilot statement posting summaries

Design & delivery

A Copilot feature in Dynamics 365 Commerce that summarizes status and risks for store financials and statements. All financial math is deterministic; the LLM only writes the narrative.

  • ▸Generally available with Microsoft Learn and Responsible AI documentation
  • ▸Paved the Responsible AI review path for the team's later AI features
Generative AIAzure OpenAICopilotFinancial Systems

AI end-to-end testing agent

2026

Initiator / Architect

For a large suite of manual test cases spanning back office, POS, e-commerce and peripherals — evolved from "generate Playwright scripts" to "domain knowledge injection + Playwright MCP structured UI perception + reusable test knowledge base + parallel multi-agent execution".

  • ▸Drove team adoption of GitHub Copilot CLI and coding agents
AI AgentsPlaywright MCPLLMDeveloper Productivity

Atome Philippines consumer lending, 0→1

2018 – 2019

Founding Tech Lead

Built lending, payments, reconciliation, anti-fraud (rules engine + ML scoring) and collections end to end; launched fast and scaled disbursements.

FinTechPaymentsLendingStartup

Latest posts

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Working at Big vs. Small Companies

After many years at Microsoft and an earlier stint at a startup, my take on how working at big and small companies compares, and how to pick the one that fits you.