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Melvin Teo

Software Engineer

Check out my projects and experiences below!

About Me

I'm a Software Engineer passionate about building products that boost productivity and simplify daily lives. Recently, I've developed a growing interest in natural language processing and uncovering the "black box" of LLMs.

Through internships, hackathons, and projects, I've gained hands-on experience in Full-Stack Web Development and AI Engineering while collaborating with designers, product managers, and other engineers.

In my free time, I enjoy travelling the world, playing volleyball, and learning foreign languages.

Technical Skills

Languages

Python
TypeScript
JavaScript
Java
Go
C
C++
SQL
HTML5
CSS3

Full-stack & cloud

React
Expo
FastAPI
Express
Node.js
Supabase
MongoDB
Firebase
AWS
Docker
Vercel
Railway
Git
GitHub Actions

ML / NLP

PyTorch
Hugging Face
Scikit-learn
spaCy
NumPy

Software Engineer

Amazon

Jun. 2026 – Present

  • Joining Amazon as a Software Engineer in June 2026.

Co-Founder

Spoddr

Social fitness platform

Sept. 2025 – Apr. 2026

  • Co-founded with a team of six, spanning customer discovery to full-stack MVP launch.
  • Built Expo + FastAPI + BLE/Arduino tracking on AWS (ECS, RDS, Cognito) to automate gym logging.

Undergraduate Student Researcher

University of British Columbia

NLP & model interpretability research

Sept. 2025 – Apr. 2026

  • Studied disentangled latent structure in a 70M-parameter transformer with sparse autoencoders (93%+ R² on 600K tokens).
  • Unified messy NLP corpora (UD, WordNet, VerbNet, Wiktionary) into one ETL pipeline; presented at Language Sciences and CS research conferences.

Software Engineer Intern

Amazon Payments

May – Aug. 2025

  • Built a CloudWatch MCP server in TypeScript so internal teams could wire AI agents into ops workflows.
  • Accelerated integration test generation by ~90% using service logs and agentic tooling.

Co-President, Software Development Director, Logistics Director

nwPlus

Student org behind Western Canada's largest hackathons (HackCamp, nwHacks, cmd-f)

May 2022 – May 2025

  • Led a 55-person team running three major hackathons (1,150+ participants, 79 sponsors).
  • Managed six engineers shipping eight internal tools used by 1,700+ people.

Software Engineer Intern · Amazon Future Engineer Intern

Amazon Prime

Customer Engagement & Retention

May – Aug 2024 · May – Aug 2023 · May – Aug 2022

  • Self-service customer-state app that cut PM onboarding time by 98% (React, JSON Schema, DynamoDB, Java).
  • Cancellation pipeline work: 33% faster processing, TypeScript CloudWatch dashboards, and Java tooling for A/B QA.
  • Retention emails/widgets plus Bash deployment automation (~43% infra cost, ~49% dev time savings).

Projects

Stamped

Stamped

Track your travels on an interactive world map, then share and compare maps with friends.

Next.jsReactTypeScriptRedisTailwind CSSD3.js
Mise

Mise

AI-powered cooking mentor that generates adaptive weekly meal plans, guides step-by-step cooking, and personalizes future recipes from your feedback.

Next.jsTypeScriptTailwind CSSFastAPIPostgreSQL (Supabase)SQLAlchemyLangChain/LangGraph
Flashlearn

Flashlearn

AI-powered language learning app with smart flashcards, translations, and personalized example sentences.

Next.jsNeonDBTailwind CSSTypeScriptFastAPI
Embur

Embur

Full-stack fitness tracker with workout logging, progress visualization, and performance analytics.

Next.jsSupabaseTailwind CSSTypeScript
🏆 expawdition

🏆 expawdition

AI trip planner creating personalized itineraries. 1st place winner at SFU Stormhacks 2023.

ReactExpressFirebaseNode.jsNext.js
HackerHare

HackerHare

On-device browser security extension: form shielding, dark-pattern alerts, and phishing hostname detection. Built with Plasmo MV3; optional opt-in anonymous telemetry only.

Chrome Manifest V3PlasmoTypeScriptReactTailwind CSS

More projects

Additional work and experiments. View full list on GitHub.

  • AI News Summarizer

    FastAPI · Hugging Face · NLTK · TypeScript · …

  • Holistic Health Tracker

    Next.js · Supabase · Firebase · TypeScript · …

  • phreview

    Manifest V3 · HTML · CSS · JS

View all on GitHub