Summary
Software engineer with 14+ years of experience building and operating large-scale distributed systems. Currently at AWS Redshift, leading fleet-wide infrastructure initiatives across tens of thousands of production hosts — OS migrations, security hardening, and performance optimization. Track record of shipping solutions to ambiguous, cross-team problems with measurable impact, mentoring engineers to promotion, and driving operational excellence across organizations.
Technical Skills
Languages: Java, Python, Node.js, PHP, Bash
AWS: Redshift, EC2, Secrets Manager, IAM, CloudWatch
Databases: PostgreSQL, MySQL, Oracle, Redis
Infrastructure: Terraform, Puppet, Ansible, Docker
Concepts: Distributed systems, infrastructure at scale, security, CI/CD
Monitoring: Prometheus, ELK, CloudWatch, APMs
Experience
Amazon Web Services (AWS) Jun 2020 – Present
Software Development Engineer II — Redshift
- Led a fleet-wide operating system migration across tens of thousands of database clusters before an end-of-support deadline, designing migration strategies per instance type, building OS-abstraction layers for forward compatibility, and implementing a staged rollout mechanism for safe, controlled fleet-wide deployment.
- Architected Redshift's integration with AWS Secrets Manager from concept to launch, eliminating plaintext credential handling for cluster admin passwords. Proposed a centralized secret rotation design that was adopted across multiple AWS services. The feature is now widely adopted by both internal and external customers.
- Founded and led a dedicated infrastructure team, establishing on-call rotation, operational processes, and a strategic roadmap. Drove security patching compliance to 99.9%+ and reduced monthly production incidents by over 85%.
- Diagnosed and resolved a critical memory management performance bottleneck in database startup caused by conflicting memory demands across services. After cross-team investigation, designed and implemented a solution achieving up to 99% reduction in P90 startup latency on affected instance types.
- Built an AI-powered operational automation system to analyze cluster health across multiple data sources, reducing manual triage work by 95%.
- Led a cross-organization privilege reduction initiative on production hosts, designing a permission management system supporting backwards compatibility, incremental rollout, and safe deployment. Also identified and drove remediation of multiple security vulnerabilities including credential exposure, authorization bypasses, and certificate validation gaps.
- Mentored 5+ engineers across levels — one mentee promoted to the next level, another successfully transitioned from infrastructure to software engineering roles. Active code reviewer and design doc contributor across the organization.
PayMaya Philippines Inc. Aug 2018 – Jun 2020
Engineering Manager — Wallet Platform Group
- Managed part of the PayMaya Wallet platform group responsible for core banking and card management systems processing all issuing financial movement on the platform.
- Led the migration of 80% of databases from Oracle to PostgreSQL, improving scalability and reducing licensing costs to support the platform's rapid user growth.
- Architected reliability improvements for financial transactions, optimizing distributed transaction handling to reduce failed payment rates and improve consistency guarantees.
Freelancer Pty Ltd Oct 2012 – Aug 2018
Senior Software Engineer
- Led development of the company's internationalization/translation service, providing language translation to multiple systems via an RPC interface using Apache Thrift.
- Owned the full stack (frontend, backend, infrastructure) of the Annual Global Scavenger Hunt — a real-time scoring platform serving thousands of participants globally.
- Built CI/CD infrastructure for Robot Framework and Appium mobile test suites using Puppet and Terraform, integrating automated testing into the release pipeline.
- Migrated core email infrastructure off a legacy stack, collaborating with Core Services to ensure high availability and scalability of email delivery.
- Served as Interim Director of Engineering for 6 months, managing 40 engineers across multiple teams while continuing technical contributions.
- Regularly conducted technical training and workshops for engineers on topics spanning PHP development, infrastructure automation, and system design.
Sourcefit Philippines Jul 2011 – Oct 2012
Web Developer
- Built and maintained client websites from WordPress implementations to a custom-built CMS. Managed full server administration including Apache, MySQL, and DNS configuration.
Technical Leadership
- Design & Architecture: Authored design documents for fleet-wide OS migrations, secrets management integration, memory optimization, automated remediation systems, and security permission scoping — several adopted as reference designs by peer teams.
- Cross-team Influence: Regularly collaborated with 6+ internal teams and external AWS service teams to drive consensus on technical decisions affecting shared infrastructure and customer-facing features.
- On-call & Incident Response: Served on multiple concurrent on-call rotations. Recognized as go-to responder for cross-domain production incidents. Authored post-incident reviews driving long-term operational improvements.
Education
Self-taught Software Engineer — 14+ years of professional experience across startups, scale-ups, and FAANG. Continuous learner with a track record of rapidly mastering complex distributed systems, from control-plane architecture at AWS to financial transaction systems.