Topgyal Gurung

Full-stack software engineer, New York, NY.

Email · GitHub · LinkedIn · Resume · Blog

I build web applications end to end, with most of my depth on the backend: designing APIs, modeling data, and taking things through to production. I have a B.A. in Computer Science from Hunter College and a Springboard Software Engineering Fellowship.

I came into engineering through data and operations work: geospatial pipelines in SQL and BigQuery at Real Factors, machine translation research on CUNY's HPC cluster, and running the digital systems at a nonprofit. Right now I am extending into cloud and AI: AWS Developer Associate in progress, plus LLM work with LangChain, RAG pipelines, and the Vercel AI SDK.

Open to full-stack, backend, and AI engineering roles in New York or remote.

Projects

Himalayan Connect NYC

2025 – present · Live · GitHub

Housing leads, job postings, and mutual-aid contacts for the NYC Himalayan community used to live in scattered group chats. This puts them in one searchable place. I was the sole engineer, working from Figma designs through to a production release: authentication and role-based dashboards, search and filtering, Google Maps integration, a Redis caching layer, rate limiting and firewall rules, monitoring, and test coverage.

Next.js, React, PostgreSQL, Redis, Google Maps API

Silicon Valley Trail

Nov 2025 · GitHub

A simulation game in Flask, built with the application factory pattern and Blueprints. Rule-based game engine with persistent state and OpenWeather API integration, backed by mock data so it still runs when the API is down.

Flask, SQLAlchemy, PyTest

RAG-based Knowledge Retrieval App

Sep 2025 · GitHub

Retrieval-augmented generation for semantic document search and conversational Q&A: chunking, vector embeddings, and cosine-similarity retrieval to ground the model's answers in the source documents.

Python, LangChain, ChromaDB

Financial Invoice Dashboard

2025

Full-stack Next.js dashboard with Auth.js authentication and streaming Suspense, over a Postgres.js data layer. Search, pagination, and caching across invoice CRUD workflows.

Next.js, Auth.js, Postgres.js

Myspace Social Media Clone

2025

Social platform on Next.js 14 with Prisma and PostgreSQL: follow and unfollow, Google OAuth, and a feed that updates in real time.

Next.js 14, Prisma, OAuth

Dog-Adoption REST API

2024 – 25

Secure API with token-based auth across 7 CRUD routes, following MVC architecture and verified with a Mocha/Chai test suite.

Node.js, Express, MongoDB

Space Travel Planner

2024 – 25

React app using Hooks and React Router, with dynamic forms, client-side routing, and full UI test coverage in React Testing Library.

React Hooks, React Testing Library

CunyFirst 2.0 Course Scheduler

2019

Backend work on a four-person Agile team: Sequelize models, Express API routes, and JWT auth for course registration.

Express, Sequelize, JWT

Background

2026 – 28 Board Member (volunteer), Lo-Nyamship Association USA. Also President of the School Student Alumni Association, 2026 – 27.
2026 Data Analytics, COOP Careers.
2024 – 25 Software Engineer Fellow, Springboard. Built and deployed Himalayan Connect NYC end to end, plus a Node/Express/MongoDB REST API and a fully tested React app.
2021 – 22 Tech Operations Associate, Krishnamurthy Tandon Foundation. Managed vendors and third-party integrations; rebuilt contact databases, records, and project documentation.
2020 B.A. Computer Science, Hunter College. CUNY 2X Tech Talent Pipeline Residency.
2019 Data Engineer Intern, Real Factors (acquired by 7Park Data). Fixed geospatial parsing errors in SQL and BigQuery that had broken map visualizations, ahead of an acquisition deadline; built dashboards in Apache Superset.
2018 – 19 Machine Learning Researcher, Hunter College. Trained a neural attention model in PyTorch on CUNY's HPC cluster and evaluated NLP machine translation models with Prof. Jia Xu.

Stack

Languages: JavaScript, TypeScript, Python, Java, SQL, HTML, CSS, Shell
Frameworks: React, Redux, Next.js, Node.js, Express, Spring Boot, Flask
Databases and cloud: PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Redis, BigQuery, Docker, Kubernetes, AWS
AI: Vercel AI SDK, LangChain, OpenAI and Claude APIs, RAG pipelines, vector databases
Practices: REST, GraphQL, Git, GitHub Actions, test-driven development, Postman

Contact

[email protected]
347-935-9179
New York, NY