Profile

Damon Zhang

Senior full stack developer, Auckland

10+ years designing, building and operating production web applications in TypeScript, React, Next.js, Node.js and AWS. I work across the whole lifecycle, from technical design to testing, CI/CD, cloud deployment and running the thing in production, and I use AI-assisted development with written specs, test-first rules and independent review.

10+
years building and operating production web applications
131
sites on CloudFront and private S3, about 90 moved stack by stack
1,100+
automated tests behind a rebuilt tax platform
13
production releases shipped through preflight, smoke and rollback gates

Projects

Tax & accounting SaaS

PayTaxNZ

Visit

A legacy Laravel tax platform rebuilt as a Next.js and TypeScript monorepo, running as 7 Docker services behind Caddy and Cloudflare.

  • Tax engine built from 186 golden assertions written before implementation, now 1,100+ automated tests.
  • 1,070 results reconciled against the legacy system: 999 exact matches, 71 documented differences, 0 unexplained.
  • Multi-tenant data secured with PostgreSQL row-level security, decimal maths and idempotent writes.
  • 8-language UI, invoicing, outbox email and an AI-assisted document inbox.
  • Next.js 15
  • TypeScript
  • PostgreSQL 16
  • Drizzle
  • oRPC
  • pg-boss
  • Docker

AWS infrastructure

Cloud migration at scale

About 90 static websites moved off a shared legacy server onto CloudFront with private S3 origins, each provisioned as its own CloudFormation stack with a tested rollback path.

  • ACM certificates, DNS cutover and a documented rollback for every site.
  • Edge caching fixed for 131 CloudFront hosts across 21 Cloudflare zones: they were 94% of request volume, now 16% of their old requests, verified with 131/131 cache hits.
  • Least-privilege IAM permission set validated with policy simulation, so a second operator can publish independently.
  • CloudFront
  • S3 + OAC
  • CloudFormation
  • ACM
  • IAM
  • Cloudflare

Church management platform

Aparima

Public, member and staff workflows for households, events, attendance, venue hire, giving and reporting, in 7 languages.

  • Server-side role, record and field-level access control with append-only audit logs.
  • Deposits, refunds and recurring giving built on integer-cent maths, transactions, locks and idempotency keys.
  • Authorisation verified by REST and GraphQL tests in CI.
  • Next.js 16
  • Payload CMS 3
  • PostgreSQL
  • Vitest
  • Playwright
  • GitHub Actions

Booking & operations

BNH venue management

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A venue management system that replaced legacy software across multiple venues: court scheduling, customer portal, e-commerce, invoicing and financial tracking.

  • Customer-facing booking portal and staff back office in one system.
  • CI/CD pipelines and Jest-based testing introduced so the team could keep shipping safely.
  • Next.js
  • Laravel
  • Jest
  • CI/CD

Public data product

NearBuild

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Search Auckland resource consent applications by address, backed by an hourly sync of the council's published applications list.

  • Hourly, idempotent sync of the council PDF; the first hourly run added 247 records and updated 3 with 0 failures.
  • Live LINZ address lookup and PostGIS radius search, with weekly capped geocoding for records without coordinates.
  • Next.js
  • Supabase
  • PostGIS
  • pdf.js

Browser tools

Kivoza

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Local browser tools for image conversion, OCR and PDF work, plus 8 Markdown converters for PDF, DOCX, PPTX, XLSX, HTML, CSV, JSON and EPUB.

  • Static front ends on Cloudflare Pages with a containerised conversion backend, deployed through GitHub Actions.
  • Vite
  • Cloudflare Pages
  • Docker
  • GitHub Actions

Also shipped

  • Abarn: iOS and Android app (React Native, Firebase) with real-time order tracking, push notifications and payments.
  • IMMIMATE NZ: bilingual CMS with Amazon SES and reCAPTCHA, released with 60/60 browser tests passing.
  • Inventory and warehouse management system with separate admin and customer-facing applications.
  • Real-time multiplayer backend services for an online gaming platform serving millions of users.

Experience

  1. 2025 - present, Auckland

    Senior Software Engineer, Hotorize

    Hands-on, end-to-end delivery of 6 production products, owning technical design, database design, CI/CD and production operations.

  2. 2016 - 2024, Auckland

    Core Software Developer, Wei Group

    Venue management, mobile commerce and warehouse systems, plus the CI/CD and automated testing that kept them shippable.

  3. 2012 - 2014, Beijing

    Senior Software Engineer, RenRen Inc.

    Backend services, real-time multiplayer features and database tuning for a platform serving millions of users.

Bachelor of Computer Science and Technology, Shenyang Aerospace University

Skills

Frontend

TypeScript, React, Next.js App Router, Vite, Tailwind CSS, React Native / Expo, Multilingual UI

Backend & APIs

Node.js, REST, oRPC, GraphQL, PHP / Laravel, Background jobs, Auth & RBAC

Data

PostgreSQL, MySQL, DynamoDB, Drizzle, Prisma, Row-level security, Safe migrations

Cloud & DevOps

AWS, CloudFormation, GitHub Actions, Docker, Linux, Nginx / Caddy, Cloudflare

Testing & quality

Vitest, Jest, Playwright, Contract tests, Code review, Monitoring, Backup & recovery

AI-assisted delivery

Claude Code, Coding agents, Spec-driven development, AI review gates, LLM integration