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resume.md

Ali Zaidi

github.com/alixedi ~ alixedi.com ~ [email protected] ~ SC & BPS

Technical Lead with 15 years of experience in building and managing teams, products and IP for startups, enterprise and public sector. Specializes in leading cross-functioning teams to timely delivery of data-intensive projects involving complex production systems.

Experienced in hiring and leading high-performance teams; Designing and managing technical roadmaps and roll-out strategies; Managing stakeholder relations; Agile and Lean Product Development; Delivery of Data Science outcomes in production.

Technologies: Python, Django, Flask, JavaScript, React, Docker, Kubernetes, Spark, PostgreSQL, Celery, AWS, Google Cloud Platform, GOV.UK PaaS, Prometheus, ELK, CI/CD etc.

Experience

Contract Tech Lead - Digi2al (March 2022 - Present)

  • Lead the migration of a live service from AWS to RedHat OpenShift.
  • Designed the roll-out plan and the migration strategy to progressively de-risk delivery while keeping stake holders updated on progress.
  • Lead on technical planning e.g. simultaneously operating the same service in 2 different platorms.
  • Lead on introducing necessary security compliance & pentesting tooling in the CI.

Contract Lead Engineer - Dept. of Int. Trade (March 2021 - May 2022)

  • Working on 4 Django services deployed on PaaS.
  • Helped the team move the project into private Beta within 3 months of joining.
  • Built the reporting system using AirFlow and Django REST framework.
  • Re-designed and re-built large chunks of the legacy system.
  • Designed roll-out plans for complex changes in schema, API; Developed the technical guide for the rest of the team to share this knowledge.

Co-founder & CTO - Dripl (January 2020 - Present)

  • Built a no-code platform for creating x-platform apps that help users pass e.g. citizenship tests, driving license tests, school entrance exams, language certifications etc.

Consultant - Public.digital (August 2020 - Present)

  • Coaching clients on Technology, Delivery, Agile development and Lean Product Development.
  • Built services for the UK government based on GDS standards and following Learn Product Development principles.

Contract Software Engineer - Dept. of Int. Trade (April 2019 - July 2020)

  • Lead the integration of Dunn & Bradstreet D&B Direct API for validated company data in the open-source CRM used every day by thousands of users.

  • Designed the data architecrure and developed the ETL pipelines for consuming company updates from D&B Direct as well as submitting change-requests and business-investigation requests to Dunn & Bradstreet.

  • Managed large-scale changes in architecture, data modelling and downstream implications for product and business-processes by carefully designing detailed roll-out plans to mitigate delivery risks while maintaining a healthy release cadence.

  • Advocated for and developed the monitoring of key technical and product metrics using Prometheus and ELK in order to ensure transparency of delivery and monitoring of performance.

  • Came up with the idea, planned and delivered the feature for automatic archiving of inactive records held by DIT in line with GDPR guidelines by engaging and partnering with key stakeholders across the board.

  • Lead the adaption of Lean product delivery at DIT by introducing Flintstones-car MVP for features - allowing the team to learn from users before committing expensive engineering resources.

Head of Data Engineering - Global Stress Index (Felix) (Jan 2018 - April 2019)

  • Responsible for technical, product and HR planning as well as execution for data engineering at Felix.

  • Responsible for GDPR compliance and data security policy.

  • Developed the high availability, high performance, streaming platform that consumed raw HRV signals from users.

  • Developed the production reporting system for internal and external users using postgres as a Data Lake.

  • Worked on increasing the performance and reliability of the APIs based on Flask.

  • Worked on CI/CD of various Felix repositories.

  • Worked on deployment, monitoring and reliability of Felix production infrastructure based on Kubernetes on Google Cloud Platform.

  • Worked on debugging memory leaks, refactoring Connexion out of the Felix API stack, optimising production Data stores etc.

Senior Software Engineer - BMLL Technologies (Dec 2016 - Jan 2018)

  • Helped on-board a Tier-1 investment bank by working with their analysts to build several Spark applications for validating the utility and scalability of the BMLL platform.

  • Worked with in house and external analytics teams to transition prototype applications working with sample set of data to full-scale, production-ready Spark pipelines running on AWS clusters with 100s of nodes.

  • Worked with stakeholders across teams to re-engineer the legacy system for on-boarding exchange data to using AWS spot instances resulting in order of magnitude savings in infrastructure costs.

  • Lead the development of the in-house container orchestration service. Planned and executed the transition to AWS linked accounts, Asynchronous APIs and several other major architectural revisions while ensuring availability of the platform to clients.

  • Helped the platform team in transitioning the BMLL platform from Alpha to Beta stage - adapting modern architectural patterns and shipping new features despite a sizeable technical debt, no CTO and no Devops team.

  • Built Spark pipeline for computing optimal sliding window configurations on one year of FTSE100 limit order data.

  • Contributed to the hiring by interviewing candidates, helping define job descriptions etc.

  • Volunteered for release management, operations and system administration.

  • Organised and contributed to the in-house engineering meet-up called Tech-Mondays.

Data Engineer - Duedil (Aug 2015 - Oct 2016)

  • Lead data engineer for features relevant to the risk and compliance customers.

  • Developed the ETL pipeline powering the financial widget. The pipeline used Apache Spark to compute ~500 financial metrics for ~10M companies with ~100M account filings.

  • Developed the ETL pipeline powering the ownership widget. The pipeline used Apache Spark to match and conflate ~250M shareholders.

  • Developed the ETL pipeline powering the related companies widget. The pipeline used Apache Spark to expose relationships between companies such as shared owners, shared directors, shared investments, similar names and similar addresses.

  • Built the microservice implementing caching, TTL, rate-limiting and searching the companies index for several EU countries.

  • Contributions to in-house framework for writing ETL pipelines, core libraries, APIs, algorithms etc.

Project Manager - Maxeler (Nov 2014 - Aug 2015)

  • Lead the development of MaxIDE used internally as well as by customers to develop data-flow applications.

  • Replaced the project templates in the legacy IDE with a new system that allowed the templates to be hosted on GitHub.

  • Replaced the Makefiles in the legacy IDE with a new multi-threaded build system that allowed code re-use.

  • Wrote demo applications for Machine Learning and Web Technologies using Maxeler's DataFlow computing architecture.

Co-Founder, CTO - BitsWits (Sep 2010 - Oct 2014)

  • Responsible for building the engineering team and ensuring that we shipped software adhering to the industry best practices while having fun.

  • Hired, trained and lead 3 Agile teams including remote members and outsourcing partners. Implemented best practices like TDD, BDD, CI, Infrastructure as code, Microservices architecture etc.

  • Developed several template-composable widgets for Django.

  • Developed a high performance Least-cost Routing algorithm for VoIP operations.

Visiting Lecturer - IBA (Jan 2009 - Aug 2011)

  • Computer Vision - Image encoding, Hough transform, Fourier transform, computational and photometric stereo, optical flow etc.

  • Distributed Computing - Synchronisation, fault tolerance, MapReduce, BitTorrent and Distributed hash tables, programming in Erlang etc.

Project Manager - Maritime Technologies Complex (Jan 2003 - Aug 2006)

  • Part of the team that developed a portable navigation system that was deployed on Pakistan Navy minesweepers.

  • Did the requirements gathering, draft architecture, feasibility and initial testing that resulted in the team choosing QGIS as the GIS platform.

Education

MSc in Advanced Computing - Imperial College London (Oct 2006 - Apr 2008)

  • Graduated with a distinction and Department of Computing Fellowship Award.

  • Distinction in final thesis: Accelerating SPEC2006 benchmarks using NVIDIA CUDA.

  • Term project was selected for presentation at the Department of Computing's research day.

BE in Electronic Engineering - NED University (Oct 1999 - Oct 2003)

  • Graduated with distinction, specialising in custom computing using FPGAs.

Open Source Projects

  • Data Hub - An open-source CRM used by DIT in production.

  • D&B Service - An API to wrap D&B Direct and provide access to validated company information to various services within DIT.

  • Gitdash - A simple data analysis application powered by GitHub pages that can be set-up in 5 minutes or less. Originally developed for human rights activists documenting the persecution of religious minorities in Pakistan circa 2013.

  • ReCLIne - Generates web interfaces from CLI scripts built using argparse (in-progress).

  • Ribosome - Wrote the Python implementation of the popular code generator.

  • Semantic Parser - Library for parse tabular data from real-world spreadsheets.

  • Palal - Library that recommends open-source license using Machine Learning.

  • Coffee Table - Template add-on for composing HTML tables from Django templates.

  • Filtered Feed - Django package for generating filtered RSS feeds.

  • Sieve - Django package for ensuring cross-site isolation of user data.

Interests

  • Conferences - Spoke at PyData London 2016 about functional patterns in ETL, ran a Kubernetes workshop at PyconUK 2018, session on how internet (actually) works in MozFest 2018.

  • Hackathons - ReCLIne was runners-up in Building better Python tools hackathon at Google.

  • Books - Taleb, Gladwell, Levitt, Ries.

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