Full-stack engineer — New York, NY
Topgyal
Gurung
I build the infrastructure communities actually use — from the auth layer to the search bar that finds someone a place to live tonight.
Flagship build below
The long way here
Hospitality, operations, data — then code.
Systems fail in the seams. Someone has to own them.
Before production code, I ran the floor at Michelin-starred dining rooms, kept a nonprofit's vendor relationships and digital records from falling apart, and chased a geospatial parsing bug through SQL and BigQuery against an acquisition deadline. Different rooms, same job: notice where things break, and fix the part underneath.
A B.A. in Computer Science and a Springboard fellowship gave that instinct a stack — React, Next.js, Node, PostgreSQL — and a focus. I'm building for the Himalayan and immigrant community I grew up around in New York City, because that community deserves software built for it, not software it has to get by on.
Machine Learning Researcher — Hunter College
Trained and optimized a neural attention model (Codenn) in PyTorch on CUNY's HPC cluster; researched NLP machine-translation methods with Prof. Jia Xu.
Data Engineer Intern — Real Factors (acquired by 7Park Data)
Resolved geospatial data-parsing errors in SQL/BigQuery, restoring map visualizations ahead of an acquisition deadline; built dashboards in Apache Superset.
B.A. in Computer Science — Hunter College
CUNY 2X Tech Talent Pipeline Residency.
Tech Operations Associate — Krishnamurthy Tandon Foundation
Ran vendor relationships and digital infrastructure across business, music, and nonprofit initiatives; rebuilt contact and records systems from scratch.
Software Engineer Fellow — Springboard
Designed, built, and deployed Himalayan Connect NYC end to end — Figma through production.
Volunteer Accountant, Lo-Nyamship Association USA
Staying rooted in community leadership alongside the engineering search.
Flagship — live product
Himalayan Connect NYC
The problem
The NYC Himalayan community's resources — housing leads, job postings, mutual-aid contacts — lived in scattered group chats and word of mouth. Nothing was searchable. Nothing persisted past whoever happened to be online that day.
My role
Sole engineer end to end, as a Springboard Software Engineering Fellow — translated Figma designs into a production application, then took it through hardening and deployment.
What I shipped
- Authentication and role-based dashboards so different community roles see what's relevant to them
- Search and filtering across community resources, plus interactive Google Maps integration for location-based listings
- Redis caching layer that cut repeat-query response times through optimized data fetching
- Rate limiting, firewall rules, and observability/speed-insight monitoring for production reliability
- Unit and integration test coverage validating the above
Stack
Process
Started from real Figma designs rather than a blank editor — every screen had to match an intended user flow before a line of logic went in, which kept the build honest about who it was actually for.
Outcome
Live today, giving the NYC Himalayan community one place to find housing, job, and mutual-aid resources instead of re-asking the same questions in a dozen group chats.
Other work
Smaller builds, same habits.
Financial Invoice Dashboard
Secure full-stack Next.js dashboard with Auth.js authentication, streaming Suspense, and a Postgres.js data layer — search, pagination, and caching across invoice CRUD workflows.
Myspace Social Media Clone
Full-stack social platform on Next.js 14 with Prisma/PostgreSQL — follow/unfollow, Google OAuth, and real-time feed updates with optimized rendering.
Dog-Adoption REST API
Secure API with token-based auth across 7 CRUD routes following MVC architecture, verified with a Mocha/Chai test suite.
Space Travel Planner
React Hooks and React Router app with dynamic forms, client-side routing, and full UI test coverage via React Testing Library.
CunyFirst2.0 Course Scheduler
Backend contributor on a 4-person Agile Scrum team — Sequelize models, Express API routes, and JWT auth for course registration.
Working stack
What I reach for.
Languages
JavaScript, TypeScript, Python, SQL, HTML, CSS, Shell Scripting
Frameworks & Libraries
React, Redux, Next.js, Node.js, Express
Databases & Cloud
PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Redis, GCP BigQuery, Docker, Kubernetes, AWS (Developer Associate in progress)
APIs & Practices
REST, GraphQL, Git, GitHub Actions (CI/CD), Test-Driven Development, Postman
Let's build something that has to actually work.
Open to full-stack roles in New York City and remote. If your team needs someone who treats the seams as seriously as the features — I'd like to hear about it.
Download résumé →