Mel Ugaddan

As of November, Currently upskilling to stay hireable and continue my career as a backend engineer (can work with some frontend work if needed like building forms). I've been reading engineering blogs, especially about distributed systems to fill in my knowledge gaps as Software Engineer, which quickly can be a rabbit hole - Redis clusters, distributed cache locks, message queues, caching strategies (In-process, Headers and Redis), and single-table design in DynamoDB. Some of understanding of these topics is still surface-level, but I'm actively building on it.

MSc Computer Science at Ateneo de Manila, my Thesis work was focuses on noisy labels in text classification and improving LLM-based annotation through text summarization. I completed all of grad courses. While some of these approaches are extremely academic, data labeling is a core challenge for most e-commerce platforms. The techniques I developed are directly applicable to prompt engineering, LLM-based product enrichment such as product description generation, and text labeling.

Was part of both London and Manila Engineering team. In charge of ShipServ Backend Data Infrastructure side that is written in Javascript and PHP. This was the first time I got into more experienced distributed system. I learned a lot of new technologies such as Messaging Queues (Kafka and RabbitMq), Low-latency text Elasticsearch and Kubernetes (AKS). My Technical Lead here was great and I learned a lot from him. I was in charge of high-throughput task such as 500k-2m product upload that has to be enriched and indexed to Elasticsearch and other tasks such as making sure types that are going to used are consistent to both Frontend and Backend Technology.

I was one the people who started of most In-house Software Systems of Eastvantage alongside with 2 amazing people. Mainly, my contribution was to establish the computations of night differential, late, overtime, holiday pays in compliance to Philippine Labor Laws and later did most of the backend performance optimizations (e.g. Caching and Optimizing Queries).

The projects I contributed are not limited to :

1. Payslip Generator.
2. Eastvantage Employee Schedule handler (Evox).
3. Eastvantage Website.
4. Employee On-boarding System during Pandemic

I completed my Bachelor of Science in Information Technology, majoring in Software Engineering, at Trinity University of Asia, where I had my first exposure to programming and core computer science concepts. During this time, I took undergrad courses with a wide range of programming languages including C++, COBOL, PHP, and Java, and was also introduced to basic hardware engineering through projects involving infrared sensors. I completed most of my internships in BPO companies and for my capstone project I built a simple prototype parking system that uses IR sensors combined a basic frontend and backend technologies with WebSockets for real-time communication, since the school was planning to build parking building within the campus.