Alexander Manuel S.

Full-stack engineer with ~5 years of experience. As the first technical hire at Tomorrow University before the pre-seed stage, I’ve demonstrated my ability to drive impact through technical solutions, supporting the platform's growth from its early days to after securing $10M in Series A funding. While I developed deep technical skills, my journey from pre-product-market fit to post-Series A taught me to think about the first principles when it comes to product. I shifted from asking, “Which technology can I use for this feature?” to “Is this relevant to the user? Why? How can we measure it and validate our hypothesis?”. From that point on, every decision I made is based on understanding what the product side wants and when this feature is planned to be delivered, from then I started to find how to execute it well, starting from drafting technical documents then review it collaboratively and finally execute while keeping the team always updated. Key Achievements: - Feature Ownership: Led end-to-end development (gathering requirements, designing, execution) of a flexible NPS feedback mechanism, enabling staff to customize questions without developer intervention and providing real-time evaluation dashboards for content creators; achieved a 90.67% completion rate with over 300 submissions per month - Query Optimization: Improved Redis-cached queries from 7s to 280ms, reducing backend load and improving UX for high-traffic endpoints - Deep Technical Knowledge: Boosted homepage load speed by 20x by identifying and resolving a deep MongoDB query bottleneck - Performance & Cost: Migrated database outside AWS, optimized queries, and reduced infrastructure cost by 50%; stress-tested to handle 100 RPS with zero errors - Onboarding Experience: Built AI-powered onboarding system using OpenAI API, leading to 85% completion and 40% CTR on key actions - Knowledge Sharing: Actively contributed to peer code reviews, fostering team-wide discussions on architectural decisions and best practices Core Competencies - Frontend: HTML5, CSS, JavaScript, TypeScript, ReactJS, NextJS, Tailwind, Material-UI, Redux, Storybook, shadcn/ui - Backend & Infra: NodeJS, Golang, Nest.js GraphQL, REST, Server-side, CDK, AWS (Lambda, DynamoDB, AppSync, EventBridge, S3) - DevOps & Tools: Docker, Kubernetes, GitHub Actions, Jest, CloudWatch, Sentry, Grafana, K6, Clerk - Database: MongoDB, Redis, PostgreSQL, RxDB, IndexedDB - Analytics / ML: BigQuery, Looker Studio, TensorFlow, PyTorch, OpenAI API, LangChain - Cloud Platforms: AWS, Fly.io, NeonDB