Bikash Lama
Seven years turning ideas into reliable, scalable products — for teams and clients alike. Full-stack on Rails, Python, and Vue.js, with AWS infrastructure automated through Terraform. Lately: shipping production AI tools alongside leading delivery teams.
I'm a full-stack engineer and project lead in Tokyo, shipping with Ruby on Rails, Python & Vue.js on AWS infrastructure I automate with Terraform. Lately I've been leaning into AI-augmented development — Claude and Cursor in the daily loop, plus production tools built on Claude's API so a small team ships like a big one.
What I work with
Things I've built
Restaurant Management SaaS
Grew a small MVP into a multi-tenant SaaS over two years of continuous delivery — now integrated into an ecosystem where the same restaurant is discoverable and reservable across collaborating partner platforms.
- Google reservation flow + cross-platform listing — one restaurant is bookable from any partner in the ecosystem.
- AI-in-the-loop optimization: used Claude and Cursor to surface API bottlenecks and tighten hot-path UI renders.
- Multi-OEM architecture deployed via Terraform with a dev → staging → production CI/CD gate.
Reservations don't just hit our DB — they coordinate across partner systems, so consistency and latency are everyone's problem at once.
↗ Two-year client retention; scope grew from MVP to multi-OEM ecosystem product, with team standards keeping quality and delivery in lockstep as headcount scaled.
AI document translator (JP → EN)
An internal tool that translates any Japanese document — Excel, Word, drawio diagrams — to English via Claude on the fly.
- Format-preserving extraction across xlsx, docx, drawio — formulas, styles, and shape positions stay intact; only the human-readable text is replaced.
- Translation cache keyed on normalized source text + target language: identical strings are never paid for twice.
- Tiered model routing — bulk and low-complexity content goes through cheaper models; technical or mixed-domain text routes to the larger one.
Two engineering problems at once. (1) Translate only the human-readable text — Excel formulas, Word styles, and drawio layouts must survive untouched, so we built format-aware parsers that round-trip cleanly back to the source structure. (2) Keep the Claude bill bounded under heavy use — made cost a routing decision: every chunk hits the cache first, then routes to the cheapest model that can handle it.
↗ In daily use across the team for spec docs, customer materials, and architecture diagrams; outputs preserve the original template so they're ready to send, and per-document cost stays bounded thanks to cache hits + model tiering.
Live commerce & consultation platform
A WebRTC-based real-time consultation product that lets customers talk live to agents across sectors — banking advisory, telemedicine, retail product demos. COVID pushed demand sharply, forcing a hard-deadline reengineering of the thin MVP into a production-grade architecture without slowing the delivery cadence.
- Real-time video consultation over WebRTC + Twilio, shipped across banking advisors, online clinics, and apparel retail under one product surface.
- Re-engineered the MVP skeleton from the ground up as customer load grew — moved from 'demo works' to '100% uptime SLA' shape.
- Observability pipeline tuned for live-call triage: structured logs make it possible to chase a dropped call back to the exact request that failed.
A real-time call is the worst place to lose a request mid-flight. Designed a version-retention deploy strategy so every release leaves the previous build live for an interval — in-flight calls finish on the version they started on, no dropped sessions.
↗ Sustained near-100% availability across multi-sector clients over a 2-year run, with zero-downtime releases that never interrupted active sessions.
Where I've worked
Senior Software Engineer · Project Lead
Nov 2022 — Present- Drove team-wide AI-augmented development — integrated Claude and Cursor into the daily workflow and codified a shared code skeleton and conventions, so velocity grows without compromising review rigor or post-incident traceability.
- Coordinated a 20-person team (engineers + QA) on a multi-tenant client SaaS — Restaurant Management System — owning sprint cadence, release planning, feature scope, and the cross-partner integrations that make the ecosystem work.
- Built an internal AI document translator (Claude API) that turns Japanese xlsx / docx / drawio files into English while preserving formulas, styles, and shape layouts — cache + tiered model routing keep cost bounded under heavy use.
- Standardized multi-tenant SaaS deploys with Terraform — dev, staging, and production go through the same modules; cutovers are debuggable and reversible.
Full Stack Engineer
Sep 2020 — Oct 2022- Led the rebuild of an in-house live commerce & consultation platform (WebRTC + Twilio) from MVP to production-grade as COVID drove demand sharply across banking, telemedicine, and apparel retail.
- Designed a version-retention deploy strategy that lets releases ship without dropping in-flight video calls — sustained near-100% availability across multi-sector clients over a 2-year run.
- Built observability tuned for live-call triage; integrated Stripe/PayPal payment flows and Twilio/WebRTC video infrastructure, powering 10k+ monthly transactions across the product.
- Designed PubSub/RPC messaging and JWT-secured public REST APIs for partner integrations.
Dispatch Web Engineer
Sep 2019 — Sep 2020- Dispatched to Rakuten's e-commerce team on a short engagement — built Python pipelines that mined trending Twitter terms and surfaced them as market signals.
- Output fed product and SEO decisions: which categories were heating up, which keywords to target, which themes the site should lean into.
Junior Software Developer
2017 — 2019- Two years on an e-commerce product as a junior engineer — shipped bug fixes and feature work under the team lead's direction, learning the day-to-day rhythm of keeping a live product moving.
Writing & notes
Education
Bachelor In Information Management
High School
Let's build something good together.
Got a question, a project, or just want to swap notes on building with AI? Drop me a line — I read every message.