By SGN | 17 Jun 2026
Tai Boon has always been equally drawn to the arts and sciences.
After pursuing the humanities in junior college, he went in the opposite direction and studied physics at Harvard. His curiosity led him to major in astrophysics and take classes in computing and programming.
After graduation, he stayed in the Boston area and worked as a data analyst at startups in digital marketing and peer-to-peer lending.
In 2020, when his partner had completed his PhD and found a job as a software engineer in Washington, DC, Tai Boon followed suit and looked for opportunities there.
“At that point Meta was expanding its footprint on the East Coast,” he says. “It is famously a tough place to work at, and it was the challenge I was looking for.”
Breaking into Big Tech
When Meta hired him, Tai Boon was meant to be one of the first data scientists at the DC office. But the ongoing COVID pandemic meant he couldn’t enter the physical offices for the first one and a half years.
He joined the Trust and Safety team, which deals with content moderation and protecting users from bad actors online. Two years in, Tai Boon transferred to the office in New York City, where he and his partner relocated to and soon got married.
Transitioning from a startup to a Big Tech company was a major culture shift for Tai Boon. Product roadmaps that used to be defined in a single afternoon now took weeks for multiple teams to align on. “It requires knowing how you fit as a piece of the bigger puzzle,” he says. “Because of the company’s incredible reach, anything you launch has magnified impact.”
He also learned to say, “I don’t know.”
“Not knowing all the answers can feel like a personal failing,” he says, “but on the scale of a company like Meta, nobody can know all the answers, and it’s better to be frank about your blind spots than to risk being confidently wrong.”
At Meta, Tai Boon has access to many role models and mentors, and he gets to learn from top minds in various functions, be it legal, policy, engineering or content design. “It has really broadened my thinking about how a good company should work,” he says.
Another benefit of working in Big Tech is the opportunity for internal redeployment. In 2024, Tai Boon stepped into the role of data science manager, which exposed him to the realms of regulatory affairs and risk management.
Tips on breaking into Big Tech
“Breaking into Big Tech in America is hard,” Tai Boon admits. Competition among fresh graduates is extremely high, so one possible path is transitioning from smaller tech firms or working for the giants in one’s home country first. “I’ve had friends come from Meta Singapore to the US and do a two-year stint, with the option to stay on.”
Tai Boon’s advice is to keep one’s eye on the long term and keep an open mind to new areas of tech.
“Getting your foot in the door, even if it’s a role only tangential to where you want to be headed, will lead to more doors being opened down the line,” he says. “I never thought I would work in ad tech, or trust and safety, but getting to learn about new spaces has been its own reward and career satisfaction.”
From afar, Tai Boon has witnessed the growth of Singapore’s tech scene and the increasing presence of big firms, not least the establishment of Meta’s APAC headquarters.
“When I left, it was rare to see anything but law or medicine topping the graduate employment surveys,” he notes. “Now, computing degrees are highly compelling, and the value proposition holds even in the age of AI.”
Living at the centre of the action
When Tai Boon and his husband first moved to New York, they lived in Midtown Manhattan near the Chrysler Building and the United Nations headquarters.
The energy of the city was infectious. “Being in the centre of the action, you never run out of things to do,” he says. “The culture institutions are great, although I think DC has an edge in terms of museums.”
Travelling around the region has also been eye-opening. “The thing about being in the US is that you don’t have to go far to see something completely different,” he says.
Now the couple resides in Union City, New Jersey, just over the Hudson River, to the west of Manhattan. “It sounds very far, but really it’s like the distance between Lavender and Kallang,” Tai Boon quips, using a Singaporean frame of reference.
Life in Union City is quieter and more affordable, and he enjoys the cleaner separation between rest at home and the bustle of social or professional engagements. At the end of a day at the office, when he takes the bus home across the Lincoln Tunnel, he leaves work behind. “It will take a lot for me to reopen my laptop at home,” he says.
Connecting with Singaporeans is precious
“New York is by far the most cosmopolitan city I’ve lived in,” Tai Boon says. He gets to explore new cuisines – everything from Southern to Ethiopian – while revisiting the familiar flavours of Singapore at restaurants like Wok Wok in Chinatown.
Meeting new people is also a thrill. At home parties, he is constantly amazed by the range of industries and nationalities represented. In comparison, most of the people he met in DC worked in politics or government. “There are a lot of fascinating characters in New York,” he says, “so the conversations are always interesting.”
Recently, Tai Boon started co-organising bimonthly meetups for the Rafflesian Professional Network in New York, which connects alumni of Raffles Institution and Raffles Girls’ School in Singapore.
The inaugural event was co-funded by Singapore Global Network. “Between my time in Boston, Washington DC and New York, SGN has been a consistent thread in creating opportunities for Singaporeans to come together and learn from each other’s experiences,” he says.
He hopes to include non-Rafflesians in the meetups too. “To me, it’s more precious to find a community of Singaporeans to hang out with,” he says. “It shouldn’t matter so much whether you went to Raffles decades ago.”
Tai Boon faithfully keeps up with Singapore news, reading The Straits Times almost daily. He has noticed how Singaporeans these days are pursuing more varied passions and paths in life. “I’m glad to see the national conversation has shifted in the last 20 years,” he says.
“Now there is no longer one strict definition of what success looks like.”
Some of his friends have returned to Singapore after stints abroad, while others from America have moved to Singapore for a few years.
“Ultimately, it’s not about choosing Singapore or the world, but choosing discomfort over the status quo,” he says. “Moving abroad makes you adjust – or choose not to adjust – parts of yourself to meet the world, and that’s a kind of introspection that fuels both career and personal growth.”
About Tai Boon
Tai Boon Ding is a data science manager in trust and safety at Meta in New York. He is a graduate of Harvard University and a co-organiser of the Rafflesian Professional Network in New York.
Connect with him here.
