Who I Am
About
Background
I'm a Software Engineer based in the Philippines with over 9 years building production backend systems — the kind that move money, authenticate users at scale, and keep running when things go wrong.
My work lives at the intersection of distributed systems, cloud infrastructure, and application security. I gravitate toward event-driven architectures, API design, and the unglamorous-but-critical work of making systems observable, testable, and maintainable long after the initial build.
I take security seriously as an engineering discipline, not an afterthought. I'm a Certified Web Penetration Tester (CWPT) and I'm pursuing a Professional Science Master's in Cybersecurity, which feeds directly into how I think about the systems I build.
Outside of client work, I run a Proxmox homelab that doubles as a personal infrastructure playground — CI runners, self-hosted services, and a place to break things safely. It's where a lot of my practical knowledge about networking, containers, and distributed systems has been earned the hard way.
I'm open to backend and platform engineering contracts — greenfield systems, migrations, performance work, or security-focused engagements. If the problem is hard and the stack is modern, I'm interested.
How I Work
Backend-First
I design for the API contract first, then build outward. Clean interfaces, consistent error surfaces, versioning from day one.
Security by Default
Threat modelling, input validation, least-privilege IAM, and dependency auditing are part of my normal build process — not a separate phase.
Ownership Mindset
I write runbooks, own alerts, and think about on-call before code ships. Systems I build are meant to be operated by humans under pressure.
Location
Philippines
Open to remote contracts worldwide
Experience
9+
Years in production
Certifications
Education
BS Computer Science
Holy Angel University · Graduated 2018
PSM Cybersecurity
Holy Angel University · Expected 2028
9+ Years, Several Teams
Experience
Backend & Platform
- Moved invoicing and billing to Stripe, including migration tooling to transfer customer subscriptions from Maxio (Chargify) and Paywhirl
- Migrated backend infrastructure to Infrastructure-as-Code (AWS CDK), cutting deployment time by 70% and enabling reproducible environments
- Built automated data replication and synchronization pipelines across relational and NoSQL stores for reporting and analytics
- Engineered integration layers and orchestration logic powering AI agent workflows across third-party APIs
- Integrated an ERP system into subscription and billing flows, and added an invoice payment flow through a third-party payments provider
- Planned and executed managed Postgres tier upgrades across staging, production, and read replicas
- Moved CI from CircleCI to GitHub Actions, and isolated end-to-end test data so the suite could run fully in parallel
- Re-architected a web app and API to be stateless, and replaced deprecated identity-provider API endpoints ahead of their end of life
Leadership & Delivery
- Led an engineering team of 6 as Head of Engineering, owning delivery from business requirements through to production
- Turned business requirements into technical designs, choosing the stack and documenting pros, cons, and trade-offs for each major decision
- Owned the engineering budget and team lifecycle end to end: hiring, mentoring, performance reviews, and offboarding
- Planned, prioritized, and assigned the team's work, and ran the release path from staging to production, including the infrastructure, databases, and CI/CD behind it
- Directed triage and resolution for critical production incidents, deploying hotfixes under pressure to minimize customer impact
- Introduced CI/CD and structured development workflows, reducing release failures and increasing deployment frequency
- Evaluated technical CVs and project submissions for engineering hires, focusing on real-world project relevance over pedigree
- Ran technical spikes to size new integrations and payment approaches before committing delivery time, including an auto-rollback mechanism
Security & Compliance
- Drove SOC 2 compliance efforts, resolving both reported and undetected vulnerabilities
- Implemented rate limiting and domain banning for commonly abused features
- Built role-scoped, self-service investigator access so outside users only see their assigned work
- Overhauled a company's authorization system, restructuring how users, roles, and per-location access are granted and enforced across the platform
- Resolved findings from an external web application penetration test, and fixed access-control edge cases around guest and role-less accounts
- Reviewed features before release for data exposure, flagging unauthenticated access paths to sensitive evidence data before they shipped
- Fixed identity-linking so each user maps to the correct authenticated identity-provider account
Systems & Tooling
- Designed database schemas and REST/RPC APIs for healthcare, billing, and SaaS platforms from the ground up
- Built internal tooling to automate recurring operations, reducing manual effort and improving response times
- Integrated event-driven microservices with Apache Kafka for reliable, ordered data transport
- Wrote reusable integration components that reduced development effort for future third-party integrations
Tools & Technologies
Stack
Languages
- TypeScript
- Java
- SQL
- Bash
Frameworks
- NestJS
- Spring Boot
- React
- Express
Infrastructure
- AWS CDK
- Docker
- Proxmox
- GitHub Actions
- Tailscale
Data & Messaging
- PostgreSQL
- Kafka
- Redis
- MySQL