PhillipCantu

About

I'm a full-stack developer from Arizona and a U.S. Army veteran — the discipline came first, the code came after.

After starting my Web Development degree at Full Sail University, I doubled down on modern full-stack + AI through 4Geeks Academy. That momentum led to me earning a spot in Flatiron School's paid engineering apprenticeship, and was recruited away by Hgraph two months in — where I grew from apprentice to junior engineer shipping enterprise SSO, a streaming AI product, and analytics dashboards across a 16-service platform.

I'm currently finishing my degree (December 2026) alongside Flatiron's AI & Data Science program (April 2027), while look for my next SWE role.

I care about the details that make software feel good: fast loads, clean types, and code that the next engineer can actually read. I'm looking to bring that to a team building things that matter.

Experience

• Software Engineer Apprentice → Junior Software Engineer

  Hgraph·Jun – Sep 2026·Remote

  • Merged 143+ PRs across 16 services and packages in under three months, progressing from single-component UI tickets to owning multi-service features end to end.
  • Built enterprise SAML single sign-on: an organization security boundary enforced in RLS and the GraphQL layer, JIT user provisioning, an admin provisioning endpoint, and the customer-facing setup guide — covered by 67 integration tests.
  • Rebuilt the company's AI agent (hgraph.ai) as a full-stack streaming product: an SSE chat backend, a persistent thread store under RLS, org-scoped spend ceilings, and credential isolation so API keys never reach the browser.
  • Delivered the customer-facing API usage dashboard from ClickHouse SQL through GraphQL resolvers to the React interface, adding bloom-filter skip indexes and bounded joins so tenant-scoped queries stopped scanning every granule.

  Read the full work record →

• Software Engineering Apprentice

  Flatiron School·Apr – Jun 2026·Remote

  • Selected for Flatiron's paid apprenticeship; worked on a four-engineer remote team under an industry mentor, with all work delivered through pull-request review.
  • Ramped on an unfamiliar production Next.js codebase, then scoped and built new features into it, owning the lesson-planner demo end to end.
  • Co-built MatchPoint, an AI-powered job-matching app, from scratch — built the backend scaffold, Supabase auth with Google OAuth, and the core database schema and migrations.
  • Recruited away by Hgraph two months into the 14-month apprenticeship to join their engineering team.

Selected Work

• 01

  MatchPoint

  Team of four

  AI-powered job search app: upload a resume, get ranked job matches with fit signals, coach weak resume bullets, and track applications. Built with a team of four during Flatiron School's AI Engineering apprenticeship.

  • React
  • TypeScript
  • FastAPI
  • Python
  • OpenAI
  • Supabase

  GitHub ↗Live ↗

• 02

  AppTrack

  Full-stack MERN job and opportunity tracker — typed end to end, containerized with Docker, and deployed across Vercel and Render.

  • React
  • TypeScript
  • Node.js
  • Express
  • MongoDB
  • Docker

  GitHub ↗Live ↗

Toolbox

Writing

• Dec 21, 2025

  JSON Web Tokens in a MERN Stack (JWT), How I Finally Made It “Click”

  A practical, evergreen guide to using JWTs for authentication in a MERN app, including the request flow, protected routes, and common gotchas.

  Read ↗
• Dec 12, 2025

  Complete React Native Installation Guide 2025 with Expo on macOS

  A comprehensive step-by-step tutorial for installing and setting up React Native with Expo, Xcode, and NativeWind on macOS Tahoe.

  Read ↗
• Dec 6, 2025

  Building a REST API with React.js (MERN with TypeScript)

  A beginner-friendly guide to building a robust REST API using Node.js, Express, and TypeScript. Part 1 of a full-stack MERN tutorial.

  Read ↗

All posts →

Contact