Nickolas Kanel
Staff Full Stack Software Engineer
Tokyo, Japan
Experienced full stack developer with technical leadership experience and an interest in building performant and maintainable web applications. I love using personal projects to learn new technologies, and I enjoy mentoring others, collaborating across teams, and continuously improving both the product and the development process.
Experience
Staff Full Stack Software Engineer · Deel
Oct 2025 – Present
- Working on a team focused on large-scale engineering changes to an existing legacy codebase, and engineering the migration from vanilla PHP to Laravel.
- Heavily involved in the adoption of LLMs (Claude Code) to help developers ship features faster and more confidently, by developing company-wide standards and tooling.
- Led the technical side of expanding the brand into multiple countries, supporting additional region-specific subdomains and deployments within the existing codebase without disrupting existing customers.
- Engineered and implemented the separation of the existing PHP/React website from its marketing pages by moving it to a separate domain with zero downtime.
- Identified, reported, and fixed multiple bugs in large open source repositories to support the implementation of tracing with OpenTelemetry.
Staff Full Stack Software Engineer · BetterHelp
Jun 2020 – Oct 2025
- Led a team of six full stack engineers through extensive code reviews and by architecting new services and third-party integrations.
- Implemented hundreds of customer-facing features and experiments using TypeScript, JavaScript, Next.js, Node.js, React, PHP, and MySQL, which led to n*$10M USD in new annual revenue.
- Architected and implemented a low-overhead in-house localization solution using TypeScript/React on the frontend and PHP/Twig on the backend to scale the entire product to international audiences.
- Integrated third-party insurance platforms using REST APIs and AWS SQS to verify user insurance coverage and bill insurance companies for therapy sessions.
- Designed and implemented security features such as PII/PHI leak protection and compromised-password checking that improved user retention (+1.5%) and brand trust.
- Upgraded the backend from PHP 7 to PHP 8 with no downtime, and was heavily involved in the upgrade from Next.js 12 to Next.js 15.
Software Engineer / Consultant · Accenture Industry X.0
Aug 2019 – Jun 2020
- Used Agile principles to diagnose the underlying problems clients were experiencing and build solutions that addressed their needs using Java, C#, Go, and Docker.
- Communicated directly with clients to get fast feedback and stay up to date on new project developments.
- Work ranged from writing scalable, self-repairing software running on hundreds of airplanes to engineering the backend and frontend of a mobile app used by EMS workers in the field.
Software Engineer · Battelle Memorial Institute
Aug 2017 – Aug 2019
- Worked with a small team to develop web apps using JavaScript, C#/.NET, and MSSQL for multiple government customers.
- Optimized SQL queries to scale to large quantities of data, reducing query times from over 30 seconds to under 200ms.
- Authored and maintained a high-performance DNA sequence loading solution using Python and PostgreSQL for threat analysis.
- Met with customers to understand their problems and propose solutions, architected and implemented new system-wide services, and integrated changes into test and production environments.
Projects
seichi.moe
2024 – 2025
- Architected, designed, implemented, and deployed a web app with custom multi-language support for sharing real-life locations from popular shows and movies.
- Users can register with an email and password or one of four supported OAuth providers, and can create, bookmark, search for, and comment on locations with their own pictures.
- Built with TypeScript, Node.js, Next.js 14, Tailwind CSS, PostgreSQL, Redis, and Docker.
- Deployed on an OVH cloud instance behind Cloudflare, with images and files stored in Backblaze B2 object storage and proxied through Cloudflare for unlimited free egress.
Manga Bookshelf for Japanese Study
2023 – 2024
- Collaborated with another developer on a web-based manga bookshelf hosting OCR-processed manga, reducing friction when looking up unknown Japanese words or grammar; integrates seamlessly with learning tools such as Yomitan.
- Users add volumes to their own private bookshelf, and the site tracks their reading progress automatically.
- Near-instant search (<20ms) across the entire library of 100+ volumes for arbitrary words or phrases.
- Built with TypeScript, Node.js, Next.js 14, Tailwind CSS, PostgreSQL, and Docker.
Education
BS Computer Science & Engineering · The Ohio State University
Japanese Language School · Kyoshin Language Academy
Apr 2025 – Jun 2025
Skills
- Languages
- TypeScript, JavaScript, PHP, Go, Python, C, C#/.NET, Java, Haskell, Elixir, UNIX Shell, SQL/T-SQL
- Frameworks
- React, Next.js, Node.js, Laravel, Tailwind CSS
- Databases
- PostgreSQL, MySQL, MSSQL Server, Redis
- Tools
- Git, SVN, Docker, AWS SQS, Backblaze B2, Cloudflare, Claude Code
Languages
- English
- Native
- Japanese
- Business level