Laurence
Bautista Full-stack & AI engineer

Selected work

1. Unla La

   Ride-hailing · 2020 – 2026

   Ride-hailing for cars, motorcycles and tricycles with live driver tracking. I built it from scratch and was its CTO until January 2026.

   Rails · Node.js · React Native · AWS

   Case study Website App Store Google Play
   20K+ monthly active users

2. Quicklean

   IoT laundry · Nodalsense

   Every washer and dryer has its own chip. The platform monitors each machine live and sets its cycle length.

   IoT · Real-time monitoring

   Article
   2,000+ machines in 50+ branches

3. Bus Bay

   Bus operations · Nodalsense

   Booking, trip operations and cargo management, with payments and IoT.

   Rails · React Native

   Case study
   Five Star Bus in production

4. AI support assistant

   Customer support · SkinStation

   Replaced Yellow.ai. It answers from company knowledge and passes harder questions to a human agent.

   RAG · Ollama · Qwen

   Article
   1,000+ messages a day

5. ByteLift

   School LMS · Nodalsense

   Includes JKEN, an AI assistant that answers from the role manuals and looks up class and exam results for teachers.

   Rails · React Native · RAG

   Case study Article
   Multiple schools in daily use

6. Techfactors suite

   Education · Team lead

   LMS, online exams, attendance tracking and a parent app.

   React · React Native · .NET
   50,000+ students, 30+ schools

7. Sky Pasada

   Airline booking · Unla La

   Flight booking app and CMS for a regional airline in Northern Luzon.

   Website
   Regional airline live bookings

All projects

GitHub activity

About

I'm Laurence Bautista, a full-stack and AI engineer based in Dagupan City, Philippines. I've worked as a software engineer for more than eight years, building and running production software for transport, laundry, education and healthcare companies, from the first line of code to daily operations.

Today I work as a software developer at Codeblu, lead developer at Nodalsense and senior engineer at SkinStation. I build Ruby on Rails and Node.js backends, React and React Native apps, IoT integrations, and AI features such as retrieval-augmented generation and agents running on local models.

I hold a B.S. in Computer Science from the University of Luzon and placed first in the 2019 DICT ICT Proficiency Exam for programming.

Writing

1. Nov 2026

   Letting an AI assistant query school records without showing them to the model

   How ByteLift's assistant answers from role-specific manuals and looks up live class data, while the language model only picks a tool and never reads a student's result.

2. Nov 2026

   Replacing a hosted chatbot with RAG on local models

   How SkinStation's website assistant answers from approved documents on a single GPU, refuses when it has no evidence, and hands the conversation to a person.

3. Nov 2026

   Safe deploys on one small server: staging, backups and automatic rollback

   How this site ships from a git push to production on a single server, with a rehearsal, a backup, a staged candidate and a rollback that has already had to work.

All writing

Experience

1. 2025 – now

   Software Developer · Codeblu

   BluOps client portal, invoicing and AI features.

2. 2023 – now Part-time

   Lead Developer · Nodalsense

   Quicklean, Bus Bay, ByteLift and smart lockers.

3. 2022 – now Part-time

   Senior Engineer · SkinStation

   Booking app, POS and AI support.

4. 2023 – 2026

   CTO · Unla La

   Unla La and Sky Pasada. Lead developer from 2020. Ended January 2026.

5. 2022 – 2025 Part-time

   Consultant · Asian Institute of Management

   Student management and grading.

6. 2022 – 2023

   Team Lead · CrewBloom

   CrewHub staffing platform.

7. 2021 – 2023

   Senior Engineer · Techfactors

   Education suite for 30+ schools.

8. 2020 – 2022

   Senior Engineer · Bliimo

   Veterans Bank, Magnolia, Goldilocks, MBC.

9. 2017 – 2020

   Freelance

   Clinic, lending and sales systems.

Stack

AI

RAG, agents, tool calling, vector search, Ollama, Qwen

Backend

Ruby on Rails, Node.js, Laravel, WebSockets

Frontend

React, Next.js, Vue.js, Hotwire, Tailwind

Mobile & IoT

React Native, SwiftUI, Kotlin, hardware integration

Languages

Ruby, TypeScript, Python, PHP, C#, Rust, SQL

Infrastructure

AWS, DigitalOcean, Docker, Nginx, PostgreSQL, Redis

Credentials

• 2019
  Top 1 passer, DICT ICT Proficiency Exam (Programming)
• 2015 – 2019
  B.S. Computer Science, University of Luzon

Questions

• What does Laurence Bautista do?

  I'm a full-stack software engineer and AI developer. For more than eight years I've built and run production software for companies, from the first line of code to daily operations: web and mobile apps, IoT integrations and AI features.

• Where are you based, and do you work remotely?

  I'm based in Dagupan City, Pangasinan, in the Philippines. I work remotely, or on site within the Philippines.

• Which industries have you built software for?

  Transport, laundry, education and healthcare. That covers ride-hailing, bus booking and cargo, laundromats with connected machines, school learning systems, and booking, point of sale and customer support for skin clinics.

• Which technologies do you work with?

  Ruby on Rails and Node.js on the backend, React and Next.js on the web, and React Native on mobile. For AI I build retrieval-augmented generation, agents and tool calling, including local models with Ollama. I deploy with Docker on AWS and DigitalOcean, with PostgreSQL and Redis.

• Are you available for hire?

  Yes. I'm open to full-time and contract roles, remote or Philippines-based. Email me or use the form in the Contact section below.