John Shao

John Shao is Co-Founder and CTO at Pipe17, where he leads engineering and architects the operational network behind Pipe17’s Order Operations Platform. Since co-founding Pipe17 in 2019, John has built the multi-tenant SaaS infrastructure connecting OMS, WMS, ERP, 3PL, payments, and marketplaces into a composable network running mission-critical order operations for brands and 3PLs including Estée Lauder, American Express, Logitech, and Radial.

At Pipe17, John is the architect behind Pipe17’s MCP Server (the first Model Context Protocol server purpose-built for order operations) and the Order Network eXchange (onX), the open, vendor-neutral standard for commerce operations that Pipe17 co-founded.

John brings 20+ years of engineering leadership across enterprise SaaS, cloud infrastructure, conversational AI, and machine learning. Before Pipe17, he was Senior Director of Engineering for Avaya Cloud, joining through Avaya’s 2018 acquisition of Spoken Communications, where he served as VP of Engineering. Earlier, he held senior engineering roles at Ayasdi, Oracle, and VMware, where he led the company’s OpenStack productization over seven years.

John writes and speaks regularly on order management, agentic commerce architecture, multi-tenant SaaS scaling on AWS and Kubernetes, and the intersection of AI agents and operational software. Born in China, based in Seattle, John is fluent in English and Mandarin.

Connect with John on LinkedIn.