Hi, I amManinder Singh Rai
Senior Full Stack Developer with 10+ years building secure, scalable web platforms — from legacy rescues to cloud deployments on AWS.
- 10+
- Years of experience
- 8
- Major SaaS products
- 200+
- Websites shipped
- 2
- AWS certifications
- MCA
- Master of Computer Applications
Shipping production software since 2015
As one of the main developers, in Agile teams
New builds, replatforms and ongoing client work — WordPress, Shopify, Magento, Drupal, PHP and Node.js
Solutions Architect & Cloud Practitioner
Amity University
Verified
Cloud Certifications
Issued by Amazon Web Services and independently verifiable on Credly.
Career
Work Experience
Ten years building and shipping software, most recently across Melbourne agency and fintech teams.
Nov 2025 — Present
Visit company website— First Page (opens in a new tab)First Page
Australia
Senior Full Stack DeveloperBuilt: Sentr — internal staff task-management platform; client websites and platform migrations
- Own and maintain Sentr, the agency's internal platform (React + Laravel) on AWS EKS, running across multiple regions with autoscaling — hundreds of tasks deployed through it every week.
- Built Sentr's reporting: financial reports, SEO performance reports and paid vs unpaid client tracking, generated automatically for department leads.
- Implemented an AI-assisted SMS recovery flow that chases clients with pending payments, turning a manual follow-up process into an automated one.
- Maintain high-revenue client e-commerce sites — UI changes, product-page and checkout work including custom promotions (buy 3 get 1 free), fast checkout, and configuring third-party apps such as the Webkul multivendor suite.
- Verify marketing and after-sales integrations stay connected through every release, on sites turning over millions in annual sales where a bad deploy costs real revenue.
- Run 2–3 client platform migrations a week onto WordPress and Shopify from Framer, Lovable, Magento and bespoke custom builds.
- Keep the GitHub CI/CD pipeline healthy so deployments to EKS stay repeatable, with a rollback path when a release misbehaves.
- Work directly with clients, their in-house developers and, on larger accounts, their stakeholders — scoping changes and explaining technical trade-offs in plain terms.
- Lead and mentor 2 junior developers through code review and day-to-day technical guidance.
Jul 2024 — Nov 2025
Visit company website— King David School (opens in a new tab)King David School
Australia
Principal Web DeveloperBuilt: School portal (Angular + Symfony) and the school's wider PHP application estate
- Designed and deployed a new school portal (Angular + Symfony), now used daily by 150+ staff.
- Hardened the portal's API with two-factor authentication (TOTP), rate limiting, and IP- and user-level blocking.
- Implemented CI/CD pipelines with GitHub Actions, accelerating release cycles and reducing deployment errors.
- Built the school portal against the Veracross, Synergetic LMS and Schoolbox APIs, pulling student, staff and timetable data from all three systems into a single interface.
- Ran the school's main website on AWS EC2, with the portal and all remaining applications on internal servers orchestrated with Kubernetes.
Mar 2022 — Jul 2024
Visit company website— Go Markets (opens in a new tab)Go Markets
Australia
Full Stack Software DeveloperBuilt: MIS — accounting and trading reporting platform; the client portal; a separate Node.js app for the marketing team
- Rebuilt MIS, the accounting and trading reporting platform, from a legacy PHP-only application into a secure React + Laravel platform used across multiple departments.
- Built trading activity reporting sourced directly from MT4 and MT5 servers, including the financial data relied on for the company's ASIC review.
- Built a suite of applications for meeting scheduling, report generation and access control, integrating Auth0, Zoho, internal microservices and payment gateways.
- Integrated payment gateway APIs across the platform — PayPal, Stripe, Checkout.com, Afterpay, Zip, Skrill and Worldpay.
- Led the modernisation of the legacy client portal into a microservices platform (Laravel + Node.js), improving scalability and uptime.
- Improved financial reporting speed by 30% through heavy SQL work — stored procedures, triggers and indexing — and cut deployment times by 50% with Jenkins CI/CD on AWS.
- Migrated the platform off internal servers onto AWS with Kubernetes alongside the senior cloud engineer, and mentored 2 junior developers.
Aug 2019 — Mar 2022
Visit company website— SoupedUp Solutions (opens in a new tab)SoupedUp Solutions
Australia
Full Stack Software DeveloperBuilt: Aged-care management application (React + Laravel) — bed booking and menu design modules
- Developed bed-booking and menu-design modules for the aged-care management application using React and Laravel.
- Applied SOLID principles and unit testing to keep the codebase maintainable long term.
- Implemented a multi-environment deployment pipeline (dev / staging / production), documented in Confluence.
- Improved SQL data handling with custom views and stored procedures.
Mar 2018 — Nov 2018
Visit company website— Techno Deviser (opens in a new tab)Techno Deviser
India
PHP Software DeveloperBuilt: Client WordPress and Magento 2 builds
- Delivered multiple WordPress, Magento 2 and PHP projects for agency clients.
- Improved site performance through caching and optimised database queries.
- Worked directly with clients to gather requirements and deliver tailored solutions.
- Assisted the senior developer with deployments and post-launch fixes across live client sites.
Sep 2015 — Feb 2018
Infra Tech Web
India
PHP Web DeveloperBuilt: eCommerce platform; custom WordPress and Drupal builds
- Contributed to an eCommerce platform, building APIs and optimising database queries.
- Built custom WordPress and Drupal themes and plugins with a focus on performance.
- First commercial development role — where I picked up production workflow, version control and code review.
Major Projects
Some of my major projects
Some highlights — platform builds, migrations and security-critical work, where the hard part was everything around the code.
First Page · internal product
Sentr — staff task management platform
The agency's internal platform, built on React and Laravel: a task manager the whole company works out of, covering who owns what, how long it took, and who needs to know when it changes.
- Role-based access control, so each department sees and does only what it should.
- Rich editor for staff to record the detail of their daily work against a task.
- Full task lifecycle tracking — when a task was first opened, when it closed, total time open, and days remaining until due.
- Follower system that notifies everyone attached to a task whenever it changes.
- Automated reporting: financial reports, SEO performance reports and paid vs unpaid client tracking, delivered to department leads.
- AI-assisted SMS recovery flow that chases clients with pending payments, replacing a manual follow-up process.
- Hundreds of tasks move through the platform every week.
- Redis caching to keep the dashboards responsive as the task history grows.
- Automated daily database backups.
Go Markets · regulated fintech
MIS — accounting & trading reporting platform
A legacy PHP-only application I modernised into a secure React, Laravel and Node.js platform used across multiple departments — and the system the business relied on for its ASIC regulatory review.
- Rebuilt a PHP-only legacy app into a modern React + Laravel platform, with security and maintainability as the drivers.
- Gave multiple departments a single place to run their work and track progress against it.
- Built trading activity reporting, sourcing trade data directly from MT4 and MT5 servers.
- Database-heavy by nature — wrote and tuned SQL stored procedures, triggers and indexes so reporting stayed fast as the trading dataset grew.
- Handled the financial data used for the company's ASIC review through this application.
- Built a suite of applications for meeting scheduling, report generation and access control, integrating Auth0, Zoho and internal microservices.
- Integrated payment gateway APIs: PayPal, Stripe, Checkout.com, Afterpay, Zip, Skrill and Worldpay.
- Later extended the stack with a separate Node.js backend for the marketing team, folded into the same infrastructure.
- Ran the platform on Kubernetes in AWS.
- Migrated the application off internal servers onto AWS, working closely with the senior cloud engineer.
E-commerce migration
Shopify → WordPress / WooCommerce
Migrated a live Shopify store onto WordPress and WooCommerce end to end — not just the catalogue, but every commercial system attached to it.
- Rebuilt the full storefront in WooCommerce, migrating products, variants and customer data across from Shopify.
- Re-implemented the payment stack and verified checkout end to end before go-live.
- Rebuilt transactional email flows — order confirmations, shipping and refund notifications — on the new platform.
- Integrated Meta tracking and the client's CRM so campaign attribution and lead capture kept working after the move.
- Built bespoke landing pages for paid campaigns.
Migrations at agency scale
2–3 platform migrations every week
Ongoing migration work moving client sites onto WordPress and Shopify from Lovable, Framer, Magento and bespoke custom builds.
- Ported design and styling faithfully, so the migrated site matched the original rather than approximating it.
- Rebuilt functionality and third-party integrations instead of dropping features in transit.
- Re-wired analytics, tracking and CRM connections on the destination platform.
DevOps & platform
Running Sentr on AWS EKS
The delivery and infrastructure side of the platform above: Sentr runs on an AWS EKS cluster, with the codebase and pipelines on GitHub, across multiple regions with autoscaling.
- Keeps the CI/CD pipeline healthy so deployments stay repeatable and low-drama.
- Run containerised workloads on EKS.
- Coordinate development work with a fellow developer — branching, code review and release scheduling.
Security-critical application
King David School — secure school platform
Built a school platform with an Angular frontend and Symfony backend, running on the school's internal servers under Kubernetes, where security was a first-class requirement rather than a later hardening pass.
- Two-factor authentication via authenticator app (TOTP).
- API hardening with rate limiting, IP-level blocking and user-level blocking.
- Main school website hosted on AWS EC2; the portal and all other applications ran on internal servers orchestrated with Kubernetes.
Personal Project
Built on my own time
A full product built end to end — design, frontend, API, auth and infrastructure.
zarx.biz
Personal productivity suite
- Next.js frontend (App Router) talking to a Laravel API, with Node.js services alongside it in a microservice architecture.
- Session auth built on signed JWTs, with Laravel middleware enforcing authorisation on every private API route rather than trusting the frontend.
- Runs behind Cloudflare.
- Runs on Kubernetes as a multi-container workload — application, API, MySQL and Redis — deployed from container images.
- A personal productivity suite: several apps behind a single login, including notes, tasks, documents and an encrypted password vault.
AI Exposure
Hands-on experience with AI
Using language models as part of the delivery pipeline — for automation my clients rely on, and for my own throughput.
LLM-driven workflows
I build and run automation workflows on top of large language models, including open-weight models such as Qwen and DeepSeek — wiring them into existing systems so the output lands where the work actually happens rather than in a chat window. That includes a production chatbot built on Claude and orchestrated end to end in n8n.
- Claude
- Qwen
- DeepSeek
- n8n
- Chatbots
- Make
- Zapier
AI-assisted development
I use Claude Code as part of my day-to-day development workflow — scaffolding, reviewing and working through unfamiliar code — which has measurably increased how much I can deliver without trading away code quality.
- Claude Code
- Code review
- Refactoring
- Faster delivery
Open source & side projects
Explore the code I build in the open — experiments, tools and repositories.
Demo
AWS Demonstration Video
A short walkthrough of an AWS deployment I built and shipped.
What I Do
Laravel developer in Melbourne, working across the whole stack
I am a senior full stack developer based in Melbourne, Australia, with ten years building production software in PHP and Laravel, React and Next.js, Node.js and AWS — for agencies, fintech and education clients across Australia and remote teams.
Backend
PHP frameworks and Node.js, plus the APIs between them
- PHP
- Laravel
- Symfony
- CodeIgniter
- CakePHP
- Node.js
- TypeORM
- REST APIs
- SOAP APIs
- GraphQL
Frontend
Component frameworks through to legacy jQuery
- JavaScript
- TypeScript
- React.js
- Next.js
- Angular
- Vue.js
- jQuery
- HTML5
- CSS3
- SCSS
- Tailwind CSS
Platforms & CMS
Commerce, content and site-builder platforms
- WordPress
- WooCommerce
- Shopify
- Magento
- Drupal
- Framer
- Lovable
- Shazamme
- Webkul
- Custom CMS builds
Databases & caching
Relational, document and in-memory stores
- MySQL
- PostgreSQL
- SQL Server
- MongoDB
- Redis
- SQL tuning
- Stored procedures
- Triggers
- Indexing
Cloud & infrastructure
AWS services, containers and the servers under them
- AWS EC2
- S3
- EKS
- ECS
- Lambda
- RDS
- API Gateway
- CloudFormation
- Elastic Beanstalk
- CloudWatch
- Linux servers
- Nginx
- Proxmox
- Virtual machines
Containers & delivery
Local dev through to production clusters and pipelines
- Docker
- Docker Compose
- Docker Swarm
- Kubernetes
- k3s
- Jenkins
- GitHub Actions
- CI/CD
- Git
- Bitbucket
Integrations & messaging
Moving data between systems, in batch and in real time
- RabbitMQ
- Webhooks
- WebSockets
- Socket.IO
- Pusher
- Zapier
- Make
- n8n
- CRM integrations
- Payment gateways
- Auth0
- Zoho
Security & auth
Standards-based authentication, authorisation and hardening
- OAuth 2.0
- JWT
- OpenID Connect
- AWS IAM
- Laravel Passport
- 2FA / TOTP
- Rate limiting
- Cloudflare WAF
Practices & tooling
How the work gets planned, documented and shipped
- Agile
- Microservices
- Event-driven architecture
- SOLID
- Unit testing
- Jira
- Confluence
- Asana
- Swagger
- Postman
Strengths
What I bring to a team
Software development is both my job and my hobby. That shows up as care for the details that outlast a sprint — tests, documentation, and code the next person can actually read.
PHP & Laravel
A decade across both greenfield Laravel work and legacy PHP that had to keep running while it was modernised. I follow framework conventions and established best practice rather than inventing house style.
Node.js
My second backend language, picked up on the job and now used in production: Node and Express with TypeScript, backed by Redis and RabbitMQ, serving a React frontend.
Testing
I ship applications with test coverage behind them — unit tests across the Laravel codebases I own, so refactoring stays safe and regressions surface before release.
Delivery & Deadlines
I plan the development cycle around the delivery date, flag risk early rather than late, and have a consistent record of shipping ahead of the deadline.
SOLID Principles
I design for performance, maintainability and security, applying SOLID principles and documenting decisions so the next developer is not left guessing.
Mentoring
I mentor junior developers day to day — reviewing their code, explaining the reasoning behind changes, and helping them build habits rather than just fixing their branches.
Background
Education
The path from school through to a master's in computer applications.
Contact
Send me a message
Goes straight to my inbox — I read every one.
Email first if you can — it's the quickest way to reach me. For a call, Tuesdays and Thursdays are best. If I don't pick up, leave a message and I'll get back to you.
Get In Touch
Let's build something great
I'm open to senior full stack and Laravel developer roles in Melbourne, plus contract work Australia-wide or remote. Happy to talk through a project either way.
Email is quickest. For calls, Tuesdays and Thursdays are best — if I don't pick up, leave a message and I'll get back to you.
© 2026 Maninder Singh Rai. All rights reserved.
github.com/maninder987linkedin.com/in/manindersinghrai