Alex Kiura

About

Alex is a builder and a lifelong learner who cut his teeth scaling distributed systems, building APIs and data pipelines. He has worked with high-growth startups like Mantium AI, BuyPower Inc., The Zebra, and Andela. Projects include deploying machine learning models that allow creators to extract insights and translate documents, tractor management and scheduling APIs, insurance comparison APIs; each of which has scaled to serving millions of daily user requests. He also enjoys writing technical articles 1. https://mrkiura.dev/articles 2. https://www.twilio.com/en-us/blog/authors/author.akiura

Experience

• Consultant · (Various organizations)10-01-2022

  • Provided outsourced AWS Platform Engineering services to Old Mutual (SA). • Reduced BuyPower Inc's AWS RDS cost by 52% while keeping CPU utilization under 50% by optimizing instances and slow SQL queries • Authored Open Source projects like gpt-n-chat-ui, Lovetest, Rizz, Rizz ORM, Teke. • Contributed to Open Source projects like Llama-index, Ollama. • Served as an Expert reviewer for GC Africa's Catalysing Equitable AI Use to Improve Global Health call for proposals.

• Senior Software Engineer · Mantium07-01-2021 – 10-01-2022

  Jul 2021 — Oct 2022 Built the user interface for extracting text and translating documents using React and TypeScript. Built a REST API using FastAPI for a low code platform that allows training, deploying and inference for machine learning models like GPT-J, GPT3. Set up a CI/CD tunnel on Gitlab and a kubernetes cluster on AWS with Terraform Recommended and led the effort to migrate to tilt.dev from Docker Compose for local container orchestration which shaved 25 minutes off the loading time for the local container cluster. Reviewed code, software design docs and architecture proposals to ensure solutions are bug free, scalable and conforms to team standards and stylistic conventions.

• Lead Engineer · CoverHunt09-01-2019 – 07-01-2021

  Migrated the entire frontend app to using React hooks. Used Apollo client to query and mutate the GraphQL API. Designed, built and scaled an async insurance price comparison engine using Django, Ariadne and Python 3 to handle > 1m requests a day. Optimised the Postgres production database to reduce the time to query for vehicles from an average time of 60.45 seconds to 0.74 seconds. Implemented GraphQL subscriptions for real time payment updates which reduced server load by eliminating the need to keep polling the GraphQL API. Achieved 100% test coverage on the frontend and backend codebases. Migrated the CI platform from bitbucket to Circle CI. Implemented mobile payments which improved conversion of Kenyan users by 50%.

• Senior Software Engineer · Andela04-01-2018 – 03-01-2020

  Led the backend team building out the Asset Management application using FastAPI, SQLAlchemy and React. Reduced the setup time for local environments from 3 hours to 30 minutes by containerising the Django API using Docker, helm and Kubernetes. Reduced bugs and increased code quality by introducing unit and integration testing for API services using pytest, selenium. Built custom authentication backends for Django services to use Google Social Auth. Overhauled and customized Django’s default admin to add custom analytics for the operation department heads. Developed continuous integration and deployment (Circle CI and Jenkins) for development projects and production applications. Ensured code quality and mentored junior developers by performing code reviews. Worked with product owners to perform requirement analysis and create tasks for the team.

• Software Engineer · Andela02-01-2016 – 04-01-2018

  Built a pair programming platform using Django and React which reduced time spent on blockers from an average of 1 day to 3 hours. Built a Meter Data pipeline API for a client using Flask, and Zappa that supported event collection and retrieval of device and geolocation data for over 500,000 water meters. Built a customer data search engine API with Flask improving turnaround times for customer service queries which increased NPS from 29 to 44. Built a performance evaluation and skills management system using AngularJS and NodeJS.

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