Shan Padayhag

I'm a backend-leaning full-stack engineer with three years of production experience, and my through-line is production optimization: I'm usually the person handed the feature that works but is too slow, too costly, or falling over.

At Mabizza IT Solutions I worked on a calculation-heavy Laravel application serving over 1,300 daily active operators. I cut API response times by 90%, from roughly 3 seconds to roughly 300 milliseconds on representative endpoints, and cut database load by 90% by eliminating redundant queries. I also used Redis for queues and caching, cut AWS costs by 10%, and held 99.9% uptime with automated monitoring and alerting.

Before that I was Lead Developer at Whitelide Solutions, building Laravel services and React frontends, giving technical direction to juniors, and establishing the team's CI workflow. My stack is PHP 7–8 and Laravel, MySQL query optimization, REST API design, Redis, and React with TypeScript, on AWS with Docker and CI/CD. I was trained on PHPUnit and test-driven development and still work that way.

Outside employment I build to keep learning — most recently an authentication service in Rust and Axum, and two local-first TypeScript apps with full test suites. Rust, SolidJS, Astro and Next.js are project rather than production experience, and I'd rather say so than have it come apart in an interview.

The gap on my timeline is straightforward. I worked full-time as an engineer from May 2021 while carrying a full-time Computer Science degree, and by graduation in 2024 I was burned out. I took a deliberate break, went through the German national work-visa process, and spent about a year in Germany looking for engineering work; it didn't land a role, but it left me at B2 German.

I'm looking for remote work with a team that measures people on what they ship. Makati City, Philippines (UTC+8), on Manila daytime hours or a late-night window overlapping US Eastern.