Cam An Nguyen Thanh
Senior Fullstack Engineer — Backend · Frontend · AI/LLM
15+ years taking data-intensive products from prototype to production.
Vietnam (ICT, UTC+7) · Open to senior fullstack / AI-integration roles
Contact & Links
Profile
Senior fullstack engineer with 15+ years building and shipping SaaS platforms and data-intensive products end to end — strong across backend (Ruby on Rails, Node.js, ASP.NET, PostgreSQL/MongoDB) and frontend (React, Redux).
For the last few years I've built hands-on with AI and LLMs: retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) over business data, AI customer-support agents, model routing by cost, and local inference with Ollama and llama.cpp.
Earlier, I scaled an affiliate-tracking platform to 100M+ daily visitors — cutting its Shopify app p95 LCP from 20s to 2.1s (earning the Built for Shopify designation), making data APIs ~7× faster, and lowering AWS costs by 20%.
I take products from prototype to production, communicate clearly with technical and non-technical stakeholders, and move fast in ambiguous environments. Author of published open-source Ruby libraries, including native C++ bindings for the RDKit and Open Babel cheminformatics toolkits.
By the Numbers
- 100M+/day daily visitors served — affiliate tracking SaaS across Shopify, WooCommerce, BigCommerce, ReCharge
- 20s → 2.1s p95 LCP cut — earned the Built for Shopify designation
- ~7× faster data APIs — redesigned backend + optimized large MongoDB queries
- 20% lower AWS cost — redesigned retention/storage; DB size cut 50% to a 2 TB rolling window
- 10 Gbps packet inspection — migrated Linux kernel TCP/IP stack into user space (PIUS)
- 15+ yrs shipping software — MMORPG infra → research engineering → SaaS scale → AI
Experience
Senior Software Engineer — Independent Contract · Remote (2020 – Present)
A continuous independent-contract track — senior engineering across SaaS performance, applied AI/LLM products, and real-time systems. Selected engagements:
Affiliate Tracking SaaS — E-commerce Integrations, Performance & Scale
- Built and scaled an affiliate tracking SaaS serving 100M+ daily visitors across Shopify, WooCommerce, BigCommerce, ReCharge, and related e-commerce integrations.
- Reduced 95th percentile LCP from 20s to 2.1s, helping secure the Built for Shopify designation and materially improving merchant experience.
- Redesigned backend architecture and optimized complex MongoDB queries, making large-scale data-retrieval API responses roughly 7× faster.
- Rebuilt observability and monitoring to expose bottlenecks, support rapid incident response, and sustain performance after release.
- Partnered with product/operations to redesign retention and storage, cutting database size by 50% to a 2 TB rolling 18-month window in RDS and lowering AWS costs by 20%.
- Refactored a large legacy Rails codebase and increased automated test coverage by 50%; designed GDPR-compliant tracking with Grafana-based monitoring.
Tech: Ruby on Rails, Sidekiq, MongoDB, MySQL, Redis, AWS, Grafana, IntercoolerJS
AI Customer-Support & CRM Platform — RAG, Model Routing & Pricing
founding engineer / tech lead · built the team from zero
- Designed a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipeline that turns CRM records into a live knowledge base, grounding LLM answers in each client's own products, pricing, and policies.
- Built an AI customer-support assistant for Facebook Page businesses that automates first-line buyer responses and cuts manual reply load.
- Implemented LLM model routing mapping each customer to a model tier by price/performance, with per-customer usage tracking for cost control and billing.
- Designed and implemented the configurable CRM pricing platform supporting complex discount and sales-strategy requirements.
- Architected CI/CD and monitoring from scratch (Grafana, Prometheus, Azure Monitor) and owned mobile delivery end to end, including complex Apple App Store review issues.
- Hired to build the engineering team from zero — recruited and onboarded 6 engineers, set delivery workflows and standards, then served as ongoing technical advisor.
Tech: C#, ASP.NET, Azure, OpenAI/LLM APIs, RAG, vector search, Grafana, Prometheus, CI/CD
VoicePing — WebXR Virtual Tour & Workspace, Real-Time Multilingual VR
- Shipped immersive WebXR features for virtual tours, distributed collaboration, and travel exploration at startup speed during the stealth phase — work that helped VoicePing reach a launched, surviving product.
- Integrated VoicePing's live-translation API into multilingual VR tour workflows, letting participants follow guides in their preferred language in real time.
- Built application-layer workflows for multilingual tour sessions: UI interactions, client synchronization, real-time state, and backend support for interactive 3D/VR.
- Integrated Mapbox-styled 3D maps with OpenLayers offscreen-canvas rendering to move heavy processing off the main thread and hold frame rates steady in AR/VR.
- Designed backend services for heavy 3D assets, session state, and distributed client coordination.
Tech: Node.js, Express.js, React, MySQL, Firebase/Firestore, Redis, AWS, WebXR
NativeX — Language-Learning App, Full Ownership Through Change of Owner
6-month engagement · led a team of 3
- Owned every aspect of the language-learning application during a six-month engagement to carry it through the company's transition to a new owner.
- Led a 3-engineer team — set priorities, coordinated delivery, and handled fixes and support directly with the in-house and acquiring teams.
- Maintained and improved the integration with LanguageConfidence's speech-AI API, which powers automated pronunciation and spoken-spelling evaluation for learners.
- Kept the app stable and shipping throughout the ownership change, with no disruption to learners.
Tech: LanguageConfidence Speech-AI API, REST APIs, team leadership
Research Engineer — Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany (2016 – 2020)
Chemotion ELN — Electronic Lab Notebook for Chemists
- Contributed to core full-stack development of Chemotion ELN — a production electronic lab notebook in active use since 2015 across research institutes and universities.
- Engineered specialized molecular search for exact, structural, and substructural queries over large chemical datasets.
- Automated computational chemistry workflows with intuitive web interfaces; built GitLab/Docker CI/CD pipelines.
- Applied ML-based methods to generate 3D molecular coordinates from 2D structures, automating a previously manual step.
Tech: Ruby on Rails, React, Python, Docker, GitLab CI/CD
Research Associate — Infnis Inc., Seoul, South Korea (2014 – 2016)
PIUS — High-Speed Packet Inspection in User Space
- Migrated the Linux kernel TCP/IP stack into user space, enabling sustained raw packet inspection close to 10 Gbps for dangerous-pattern detection without compromising application stability.
Tech: C/C++, Boost
Software Engineer — Cargigi (acquired by eBay Motors), Ho Chi Minh City (2012 – 2014)
ADAM — Auto Data Administration and Marketing
- Built customer-facing inventory management interfaces for auto dealer networks.
- Integrated automated web services to publish high-volume dealership advertisements to Craigslist.
- Developed customized internal CRM tools to track operational metrics and improve workflow visibility.
Tech: ASP.NET
System Engineer — VNG Corporation, Ho Chi Minh City (2011 – 2012)
World of JX — MMORPG Infrastructure
- Administered and scaled production infrastructure for one of Vietnam's most popular MMORPGs, maintaining availability and performance across 200+ dedicated servers.
- Automated log parsing, maintenance, and internal request workflows through custom monitoring and administration interfaces.
Tech: PHP/CodeIgniter, Zabbix, Shell scripting
Research & Open Source
ChemScanner — Open-Source Chemical Information Extraction
Research Collaborator (Part-time) · ComPlat Group, KIT · 2016 – Present
- Collaborate part-time with the ComPlat group at KIT (where I completed my PhD) on ChemScanner, an open-source tool that extracts and interprets chemistry reactions from scientific documents — an ongoing collaboration with peer-reviewed publications (J. Cheminform., 2019).
- Extended the pipeline with locally-hosted LLM inference (Ollama, llama.cpp), tuning prompts to interpret and normalize chemical information the deterministic extractor cannot resolve — kept fully on-premise to protect research data.
- Built and maintain the document-management and validation interfaces, integrating Ruby/Rails and React with C/C++ extraction components via SWIG.
Tech: Ruby on Rails, React, C/C++, SWIG, Ollama, llama.cpp, local LLM
Open-source libraries
- rdkit_chem — Ruby bindings for the RDKit C++ cheminformatics toolkit, bridged via SWIG/Rice.
- openbabel-ruby — Ruby bindings for the Open Babel C++ chemical toolbox.
- chem_scanner — Open-source library behind the peer-reviewed ChemScanner tool (J. Cheminform., 2019).
- ruspider — Ruby client for the ChemSpider chemical-structure database API.
Education
- Ph.D., Organic Chemistry — Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany (2016 – 2019)
- M.Sc., Aerospace Information Engineering — Konkuk University, South Korea (2014 – 2016)
- B.Eng., Computer Science and Engineering — Ho Chi Minh City University of Technology, Vietnam (2006 – 2011)
Publications
Google Scholar — 245 citations · h-index 6 · i10-index 5
- Huang, Y.-C.; Tremouilhac, P.; Nguyen, A.; Jung, N.; Bräse, S. ChemSpectra: a web-based spectra editor for analytical data. J. Cheminform. 2021, 13 (1), 8. · cited by 24
- Tremouilhac, P.; Huang, P.-C.; Lin, C.-L.; Huang, Y.-C.; Nguyen, A.; Jung, N.; Bach, F.; et al. Chemotion Repository, a curated repository for reaction information and analytical data. Chem. Methods 2021, 1 (1), 8–11. · cited by 25
- Tremouilhac, P.; Lin, C.-L.; Huang, P.-C.; Huang, Y.-C.; Nguyen, A.; Jung, N.; Bach, F.; et al. The repository Chemotion: infrastructure for sustainable research in chemistry. Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. 2020, 59 (50), 22771. · cited by 61
- Nguyen, A.; Huang, Y.-C.; Tremouilhac, P.; Jung, N.; Bräse, S. ChemScanner: Extraction and re-use(ability) of chemical information from common scientific documents containing ChemDraw files. J. Cheminform. 2019, 11 (1), 77. · cited by 18
- Huang, Y.-C.; Nguyen, A.; Gräßle, S.; Vanderheiden, S.; Jung, N.; Bräse, S. Addition of dithi(ol)anylium tetrafluoroborates to α,β-unsaturated ketones. Beilstein J. Org. Chem. 2018, 14 (1), 515–522. · cited by 4
- Tremouilhac, P.; Nguyen, A.; Huang, Y.-C.; Kotov, S.; Lütjohann, D. S.; Hübsch, F.; Jung, N.; Bräse, S. Chemotion ELN: an open-source electronic lab notebook for chemists in academia. J. Cheminform. 2017, 9 (1), 54. · cited by 104
Peer-reviewed publications with An Nguyen as a listed author. Full profile on Google Scholar.
Contact
Email caman.nguyenthanh@gmail.com — open to senior fullstack / AI-integration roles. Based in Vietnam (ICT, UTC+7).