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Japan · @cureseven

Nana
OGASAWARA

Software Engineer · Project Manager

Backend engineer with 6+ years of experience in PHP, MySQL, large-scale web services, and technical project management. Experienced in performance optimization, system operations, team coordination, and improving engineering workflows.

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cureseven, Nana's personal brand character

personal brand character — “cureseven”

Database tables
1,300+
Records
100–200M
Monthly visits
~150M
Requests / minute
~60k

Scale of the e-commerce platform maintained at BASE, Inc.

About

An engineer who ships, and a lead who keeps projects moving.

Six years of backend engineering on services where correctness and performance are business-critical — paired with the project management side of getting cross-team work delivered.

Backend Engineering

Designing and maintaining server-side systems in PHP / CakePHP against large relational schemas, with a bias toward measurable performance and operational stability.

  • PHP
  • CakePHP
  • MySQL
  • Performance

Large-scale Web Services

Day-to-day work on an e-commerce platform serving hundreds of millions of records and tens of thousands of requests per minute, including query tuning and incident response.

  • Scalability
  • Observability
  • Operations

Project Management

Leading cross-functional projects end to end: scoping, estimation, risk management, stakeholder alignment, and release planning across engineering, CS, and business teams.

  • Agile
  • Scrum
  • Cross-team

Workflow & Documentation

Improving how teams work — schema documentation, onboarding material, review practices, and internal tooling that reduces repeated support cost.

  • Documentation
  • DX
  • Enablement

Online I go by cureseven — the handle I use for conference talks, ISUCON teams, and open source. It has followed me since university, and the character stuck around as a small piece of personal branding.

Career

Six years across e-commerce, web services, and marketing platforms.

  1. BASE, Inc.

    2021.02 — 2026.07

    Software Engineer / Project Lead

    Backend development and technical leadership on a large-scale e-commerce platform, combining hands-on engineering with project management.

    • Owned backend features and operational improvements across a platform with 1,300+ database tables.
    • Led performance optimization work: query analysis, indexing strategy, and reducing load on hot paths.
    • Acted as project lead for cross-team initiatives, coordinating engineering, CS, and business stakeholders.
    • Improved on-call and operational workflows, including monitoring, alert triage, and runbook documentation.
    • Mentored engineers through code review, design discussion, and onboarding documentation.

  2. Appirits, Inc.

    2020.08 — 2021.01

    Full-stack Engineer

    Full-stack development on web services, working across server-side implementation, database design, and frontend delivery.

    • Implemented features end to end, from schema design to UI.
    • Handled maintenance and bug triage for running services.

  3. Willgate, Inc.

    2019.04 — 2020.07

    Software Engineer

    First engineering role: server-side development for web marketing products, with an emphasis on data handling and reliability.

    • Built and maintained backend features in PHP against MySQL.
    • Participated in agile development and release operations.
Projects

Selected work, framed by the problem it solved.

Each project below is described by its constraints, the decisions made, and the outcome — not by a list of frameworks.

  • 2024 — 2025Project Management

    Inquiry Response Cost Reduction Project

    Project Lead6 members (Engineering, CS)

    Recurring support inquiries were consuming significant engineering and CS time. The project targeted the root causes rather than the symptoms.

    Led analysis of inquiry categories, prioritized fixes by cost impact, and drove product and documentation changes that removed the most frequent inquiry sources.

    • PHP
    • CakePHP
    • MySQL
    • Redis
    • New Relic
  • 2021 — 2026Operations

    App Maintenance & Operations

    Backend Engineer / Operations Owner4–8 members

    Continuous ownership of a suite of production apps on a high-traffic e-commerce platform, covering incident response, performance, and long-term maintainability.

    Kept services stable under ~60k requests per minute while steadily reducing operational toil through monitoring, automation, and refactoring.

    • PHP
    • MySQL
    • AWS
    • Docker
    • Sentry
    • New Relic
  • 2023 — 2024Engineering

    Pricing Model Expansion Project

    Technical Lead7 members (Engineering, PM, Business)

    Expanded the platform to support additional pricing models, which touched billing, entitlement, and reporting across multiple services.

    Designed the domain model and migration strategy, then led implementation so that existing contracts remained correct throughout the rollout.

    • PHP
    • CakePHP
    • MySQL
    • DDD
    • AWS SQS
  • 2023Project Management

    Table & Column Comment Documentation Project

    Project Lead10+ contributors

    A 1,300-table schema with sparse documentation slowed down investigation, onboarding, and safe schema changes.

    Established a documentation standard and a lightweight review flow, then coordinated contributors across teams to annotate tables and columns at scale.

    • MySQL
    • PHP
    • Internal tooling
  • 2022 — 2023Engineering

    App Pricing Revision Project

    Backend Engineer / Sub Lead5 members

    Revised pricing for existing apps, requiring careful handling of active subscriptions, notifications, and edge cases around billing periods.

    Implemented the billing changes and notification flow, and designed verification steps to guarantee no unintended charges for existing users.

    • PHP
    • MySQL
    • AWS SES
    • AWS SNS
Technical Skills

Tools used in production, not just tried once.

Backend

  • PHP
  • CakePHP
  • Laravel
  • Ruby on Rails

Database

  • MySQL
  • Redis
  • OpenSearch

Infrastructure / AWS

  • AWS
  • Docker
  • SES
  • SNS
  • SQS

Monitoring

  • New Relic
  • Sentry

Frontend / Mobile

  • React Native
  • Firebase

Development

  • Agile
  • Scrum
  • DDD
Education & Certifications

Formal background and continued practice.

Yamaguchi University

Department of Intelligent Information Engineering

Graduated 2019

Certifications

  • Applied Information Technology Engineer
  • Fundamental Information Technology Engineer
  • AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
  • AWS Certified Solutions Architect
  • TOEIC 685
  • Financial Planner Level 3

Competitions

  • ISUCON10 — Final Round Participant
  • ISUCON 9 / 11 / 12 — Participant

Performance tuning contests — a direct extension of day-to-day work on query and throughput optimization.

Presentations

Talks and lightning talks.

Sharing what worked — and what did not — at conferences and internal sessions.

Off the clock

Outside of work

Formula 1
Former F1 Ambassador. Race weekends, strategy calls, and an unreasonable amount of tyre-degradation talk.
Singing
A long-running habit — the fastest way to reset after a release week.
Specialty Coffee
Single origins, hand brewing, and comparing extraction notes far too seriously.
Fishing
Slow mornings by the water — the opposite of an on-call rotation.
cureseven character illustration
cureseven, since 2015