Phoscart
Professional photography platform for showcasing and selling work — connect with clients, grow a business, and share a portfolio online.
React · TypeScript · Strapi · AWS
Live · Web platform
Senior Full-Stack Engineer
Manoj Pandian Sakthivel
Senior full-stack engineer — ten years across genomics, education and analytics platforms, moving from frontend leadership to owning backend, data and infrastructure delivery (React/TypeScript, Rust, Python, AWS, Terraform). Known for finding the one performance optimisation that changes everything: a 30-minute pipeline became a sub-millisecond lookup; a 90-second page became three. I ship test-first (TDD — Jest, Playwright), end-to-end — including three live products of my own.
Career
Experience
Oct 2022 – Present
Lead Front-End Developer, NatureMetrics — Guildford, UK
Replaced a 30-minute, resource-heavy pipeline with a sub-millisecond database lookup by precomputing results once — cutting both runtime and infrastructure cost.
- Built the platform's frontend from scratch in React & TypeScript, leading and mentoring the 3-person frontend team and shipping test-first with automated unit, integration and end-to-end tests (Jest, Playwright).
- Took over the platform's Go GraphQL backend when one engineer left and the other went on long-term leave — and have owned backend delivery alongside frontend since.
- Designed and built a new Rust engine powering dashboard data queries, plus a Dagster pipeline ingesting GBIF biodiversity data.
- Own the infrastructure end-to-end: Terraform (Infrastructure as Code), GitHub Actions CI/CD, AWS ECS/Fargate deployments, and observability with OpenTelemetry, Prometheus and Sentry.
Mar 2019 – Oct 2022
Front-End Web Developer, EMBL-EBI — Cambridge, UK
Cut an Ensembl feature's load time from ~90s to under 3s with targeted database indexes — cracking in days a problem the team had worked for weeks.
- Rebuilt a legacy bioinformatics platform in React, TypeScript and GraphQL within a 15-member cross-functional team.
- Twice held the rotating release-manager role for a 13-developer team — both releases shipped with zero critical defects.
- Led incident response as the primary point of contact for production issues and non-technical scientific stakeholders.
Jun 2015 – Feb 2019
Developer, SchoolPod — Leicester, UK
Rebuilt the parent portal used by 100,000 parents into a responsive, far more usable experience — shortlisted for Employee of the Year (one of 4 nominees across 160 staff).
- Helped grow SchoolPod from a buggy 150-school product into a 3,000-school flagship, as one of a two-developer team.
- Worked with sales, support, and QA to turn a running list of product issues into a prioritised backlog, then cleared it one item at a time.
- Designed fast, intuitive UIs for high-pressure environments such as the school-lunch till.
- Pitched the CTO on clustering every table's index by school rather than primary key — a database-wide performance win adopted across the product.
Jun 2014 – Feb 2015
Developer, FutureRising Ltd — London, UK
As one of the first two hires after the founders, took sole ownership of the platform — maintaining and running it after handover from the original contract developer.
Built & shipped
Personal projects
Live products I build and ship.
Kempt
Native macOS utility that turns messy folders into tidy structures — sort by type, extension, or date with preview, undo, and a free core plus an optional Kempt Pro upgrade.
Swift · SwiftUI · macOS
Live · macOS appRummy Score Tracker
Free browser scorekeeper for Indian Rummy, used by 500+ players a month — track rounds, dealers, eliminations, and history with no install and no account.
React · TypeScript · Vite
Live · Web app
Toolbox
Skills
Languages
- Go
- Rust
- TypeScript
- JavaScript
- Node.js
- Python
- Java
- PHP
- Perl
- SQL
Frontend
- React
- Redux Toolkit
- Next.js
- Vite
- Bun
- Tailwind CSS
- shadcn/ui
- Framer Motion
- TanStack Query
- React Hook Form
- Passkeys / WebAuthn
- Recharts
- jspreadsheet
- D3
- WebGL
- Leaflet
- react-leaflet
- React-PDF
- Storybook
- Jest
- Playwright
- Web performance optimisation
Backend & APIs
- GraphQL
- gRPC
- grpc-gateway
- Axum
- SQLx
- Tokio
- REST APIs
- GraphQL API design
- JWT auth
- scoped bearer tokens
- Supabase
- Stripe
- Resend
- JsonBin
- Paysafe
Data & Pipelines
- Dagster
- Argo
- BigQuery
- GBIF data
- Parquet
- FastAPI
- pandas
- GeoPandas
- GeoJSON
- uv
Datastores
- PostgreSQL
- PostGIS
- MySQL
- MariaDB
- MongoDB
- Neo4j
- Redis
- DuckDB
- SQLite
Cloud & DevOps
- AWS ECS
- AWS Fargate
- S3
- Cognito
- SQS
- SES
- Secrets Manager
- CloudWatch
- IAM
- Terraform (Infrastructure as Code)
- GitHub Actions (CI/CD)
- Docker
- Git
- Vercel
Observability & Monitoring
- OpenTelemetry
- Prometheus
- Sentry
Practices
- TDD
- Extreme Programming (XP)
- Agile
CMS
- Strapi
Analytics
- Google Analytics
- Looker Studio
Native / Mobile
- Swift
- SwiftUI
- macOS
- React Native
- Expo
Foundation
Education
- 2013 – 2014
MSc Advanced Computer Science
University of Leicester, UK
Merit · Best Software Project award
- 2009 – 2013
B.Eng Computer Science
Jeppiaar Engineering College, India
First Class
Beyond work
Interests
- Badminton
- Photography
- Bouldering
- Gardening
- Travel