Nkanyiso Nzimande

About

Applied AI Engineer and Technical Lead (5+ years) building and operating production AI systems inside client environments. Leads end-to-end architecture, implementation, and operations across AI and full-stack platforms, translating ambiguous requirements into reliable, observable systems and maintaining production reliability under real-world usage. Currently forward-deployed to close the gap between prototype and product across LLM agent ecosystems, Next.js/Firebase/Python services, and secure mobile + data pipelines for longitudinal research studies.

Experience

• Technical Lead / Applied AI Engineer · MJ Technologies Inc2024

  Technical Lead / Applied AI Engineer MJ Technologies Inc, Chicago, IL, USA | 2024 - Present AI software engineering agency building and operating production systems for venture-backed and institutional clients. Serve as forward-deployed sole or lead engineer embedded within client teams. Client: Pathos Communications, London, UK | Forward Deployed Engineer (Client-Embedded) - Forward-deployed across an AI agent ecosystem of three coordinated systems on a shared LLM reasoning layer (Pathos Mind, Web Application, Pressella Meeting Agent), supporting paying clients through IPO. - Built Pathos Mind, the orchestration brain, on the OpenAI SDK with staged prompt pipelines, schema-validated outputs, and retry/backoff layers; powers article generation across the ecosystem. - Rebuilt the Pathos Web Application from a Streamlit prototype into a production-grade Next.js + Firebase + Python services platform with bulk async ingestion. Reduced per-lead processing from ~5 minutes to under 1 minute and batches from 2–3 hours to 15–20 minutes across 200,000+ indexed leads. - Designed and shipped Pressella, a three-stage meeting agent (transcript, enrichment, follow-up) with idempotent per-stage replays and production observability. - Mentored junior engineers and established review and documentation standards where there was previously none. Client: Chat2Learn (University of Chicago’s BIP Lab), Chicago, US | Technical Lead (Mobile & Data) - Re‑architected the mobile learning platform for a $500K DoE-funded, 5,000-family longitudinal study to support cohort-based content sequencing and AI-driven educational experiments, enabling staggered releases without disrupting live data collection. - Modeled teacher, classroom, and learner entities around evolving research protocols, balancing flexible study design with data integrity and experimental control. - Implemented backend‑mediated writes, closed‑enrollment authentication, and append‑only engagement logs to ensure secure, auditable data across experimental arms. - Owned the full React Native–Expo EAS release pipeline, coordinating institutional TestFlight and App Store deployments with live data‑collection phases.

• Co-Founder and Backend Engineer · EventSpase2018 – 2024

  Co-Founder and Backend Engineer EventSpase, Providence, RI, USA | 2018 -2024 - Co-founded a startup, shipping product end-to-end: backend services, frontend features, and user-facing decisions. - Scaled into institutional enterprise software used for programs including the Future of Sustainable Investing conference, earning coverage in The Boston Globe. - Chose to wind down when opportunity proved structurally low-leverage relative to engineering and operational effort.

Education

• Brown UniversityBachelor’s, Computer Science

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