Nathan Florendo

• Engineered an AI-powered journaling and note management feature that enabled students to record reflections, organize notes with tags, and gain insights through real-time sentiment analysis. Integrated Hugging Face APIs to auto-tag entries and provide instructors visibility into student sentiment trends across cohorts.
• Built secure RESTful APIs with Express.js and PostgreSQL, implementing OAuth 2.0, middleware validation, and error handling to support student and instructor workflows.
• Deployed containerized services to cloud infrastructure, leveraging background job queues for asynchronous tasks (sentiment analysis, quiz scoring) and managing environment configuration securely.
• Integrated responsive React components into the LMS dashboard with single sign-on, real-time updates, and intuitive UIs for journaling, retrieval, and quiz completion.
• Streamlined delivery with CI/CD pipelines (GitHub Actions, Prisma migrations) and Agile practices (Git branching strategies, code reviews, documentation).

I am a backend-focused software engineer with hands-on experience in full-stack development, CI/CD pipelines, and applied AI integration. Currently, I work as a Software Engineer at Square (EdTech startup), where I build features such as an AI-powered journaling and flashcard engine with a Strapi-based GraphQL backend, PostgreSQL schemas, and automated pipelines (GitHub Actions, containerization) using Jira workflows and collaborative development practices.

Beyond professional roles, I have built multiple projects:

• MemoryVault – Full-stack journaling platform (Express.js, Prisma, PostgreSQL, React/Tiptap) with AI-powered tagging, OAuth, and CI/CD deployment.
• ActivitySync – FastAPI + PostgreSQL app syncing Strava workouts to Google Calendar, featuring OAuth, a Cloudflare Worker proxy, and job queueing.

I am pursuing a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science with a Software Engineering concentration at the University of Illinois Chicago, where I maintain a 3.9 GPA and am expected to graduate in December 2025. My coursework spans advanced data structures, artificial intelligence, databases, cloud computing, software engineering, and human-computer interaction, and I have reinforced this knowledge by serving as a Teaching Assistant for Advanced Data Structures. Through academic projects such as an *AI puzzle solver (BFS, DFS, A)**, a decision tree learner in C++, a 2D Unity game, and a retrieval-augmented generation pipeline in Scala, I have gained practical experience applying algorithms, backend systems, and modern software engineering practices to real-world problems.