Daniel Manning
Software Engineer
Aspiring Designer
Full stack software engineer with a passion for creating beautiful user experiences
My expertise lies in modern web development and infrastructure, with a focus on Next.JS, React, TypeScript, AWS, MongoDB and Postgres, and Deno/NodeJS.
Experience
Primary (since Aug 2024)
Senior Software Engineer
A fast-paced Sydney-based fintech startup tackling treasury management. Specializing in frontend product development with React+TypeScript in Remix, I worked closely with designers to bring polished, user-centered experiences to life. Known for bridging gaps, proposing innovative solutions, and executing with a ‘get-it-done’ mindset to deliver impactful features across the full stack.
ReadCloud (Mar 2023 - Aug 2024)
Lead Software Engineer
Leading a small team of engineers, involving: planning, management, mentoring, hiring, design, product development.
I've led and significantly contributed to projects such as:
- A full stack LMS plugin served to ~10k active users, written with: React, TypeScript, shadcn/ui + Tailwind, Deno Deploy, Supabase (postgres), and PHP for a Moodle integration.
- A component library based on shadcn/ui
- AWS cost savings and optimizations, and the migration of existing infrastruction to CDK + SST
- Introducing observability infrastructure like CloudWatch, Sentry, and analytics using PostHog
- Maintaining and migrating legacy PHP and Python APIs/applications
- Maintaining a Java + Kotlin (Spring) API
CultureAmp (Nov 2019 - Mar 2023)
Snr. Software Engineer
Full stack development using React, TypeScript, NodeJS, Kotlin, Elm, and historically Flow and Ruby. Innovated and maintained in-house design system and component library (Kaizen Design System). Gained SRE experience using AWS + CDK. Worked in projects using event sourcing/CQRS. Worked mostly in the team responsible for maintaining the health of frontend tooling and development throughout the company, for example deplying and maintaining Renovate bot (for dependency updates).
ReadCloud (Oct 2017 - Nov 2019)
Software Engineer
Full stack engineer at an EduTech company. This involved getting my hands dirty with a large number of technologies, mostly React, Typescript, NodeJS, Java, and MongoDB. Being one of the very few developers, I enjoyed the full experience of setting up infrastructure on vanilla VMs with docker, later moving to AWS and automating through Gitlab's CI, also taking on some design of UIs.
Airwallex (Nov 2016 - Oct 2017)
Junior-Mid Software Engineer
Mostly frontend engineer with exposure to Kotlin, Java + Spring, React, Typescript + Flow. Additionally, I gained experience with distributed systems such as Cassandra DB, RabbitMQ, and is in this job where I became more advanced with Docker (incl. Compose and Swarm, and some Kubernetes).
Education
Bachelor of Science (Computer Science) Honours 1st Class
Jan 2020 - June 2021
RMIT
Computer science honours degree with a focus on research, completing a 6 month thesis on the topic of fairness in multi armed bandits (in the recommendation domain), along with engaging electives involving AI techniques in games (heavy focus on reinforcement learning), and cloud infrastructure development.
GPA: 4.0
Later in 2022, I began a PhD into the intersection between deep reinforcement learning (e.g. PPO) and large pretrained language models (e.g. GPT, BERT), to understand how we can improve overall reasoining capabilities in sequential decision making. I intensively study how these language models perform and can be used to play text-based games like Zork, and, at the time, found unanswered research questions relating to their inability to determine which actions they can make, and what their long term effects are. My passion lies here: to give language models the ability to think slowly rather than quickly.
After about a year of research, it became clear that academia isn't all that it seems. Personal circumstances and life goals shift, and my language and reasoning ideas felt irrelevant under the shadow of the LLM boom. If I undertake this again, overseas (probably EU) academic models seem like the way to go!
Bachelor of Software Engineering
Jan 2013 - Nov 2016
RMIT
Array of subjects (see transcript for list) such as low level assembly programming, advanced mathematics for computing, AI, object oriented software design, web dev, and an industry project + internship at ReadCloud in 2015. This degree along with it's real-world experience led to my career in software engineering, with a focus on web development and the ecosystem surrounding it (backend, frontend, infrastructure/AWS etc).
TranscriptGPA: 4.0