Sean Manalili

Principal Developer & Solutions Architect

I architect cloud systems that carry real production load.

And I still write the code that runs on them. Twenty years across travel, insurance, banking and HR tech — taking a business problem nobody has fully specified, proving the risky part with a POC, then building it with the team rather than handing down a diagram.

Right now I lead a cross-shore team of engineers split between the Philippines and Australia, working on AI in hiring.

Philippines · AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional · MSc CS (AI)

Selected work

  1. 2025 —

    AI-powered candidate recommendation

    OpenSearch retrieval combined with Amazon Bedrock to close semantic gaps lexical matching couldn't cover. Built a retrospective evaluation approach validating recommendations against historical hiring outcomes, now extending it with LLM-based re-ranking.

    • Bedrock
    • OpenSearch
    • .NET
    • Evaluation

  2. 2025 —

    AI-generated interview questions

    Role-specific questions grounded in the job requisition, replacing manual question writing. Shipped to enterprise clients across Asia, Europe, North America and Australia/NZ.

    • Bedrock
    • .NET
    • React

  3. 2024–25

    Payments over InstaPay and PesoNet

    Payment transfer and pay-to-merchant flows for a Philippine bank's web and mobile apps, plus biller integrations for Autosweep, SSS, FWD and St Luke's.

    • Architecture
    • Payments

  4. 2021–24

    Flare and VONQ — two revenue lines

    Superannuation subscriptions and multi-board job ad distribution. Both earn a percentage on every transaction.

    • .NET Core
    • Integrations

  5. 2021

    Test automation for adjuster claims

    Ran the proof of concept and established the framework. Saves nine man-days of effort on every release.

    • Cucumber
    • Selenium
    • Java

Experience

Earlier roles (5)
  • 2014Sportsbook DeveloperBetsson
  • 2012–14Senior Software DeveloperSignal Data Corporation
  • 2011–12System Engineeri-BRIDGE Inc.
  • 2007–09Senior Software EngineerAccenture (Navitaire)
  • 2005–07Software EngineerCanon Information Technologies Philippines

Background

Education

MSc Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence
De La Salle University Manila, 2010

BS Computer Science, major in Computer Engineering
De La Salle University Manila, 2004

Certifications

  • AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional
  • AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate
  • AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
  • Philnits / Japan IT Standard Examination

Publication

Azcarraga, A. & Manalili, S. (2011). Design of a Structured 3D SOM as a Music Archive.In Advances in Self-Organizing Maps, LNCS. Springer, pp. 188–197.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-21566-7_19

Contact

Always happy to talk architecture, AWS, or engineering leadership.