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Salauat Kakimzhanov
Salauat Kakimzhanov

Curriculum Vitae

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Salauat Kakimzhanov 🇰🇿
Author
Salauat Kakimzhanov 🇰🇿
I am passionate about turning ideas into working systems. My work spans robotics, cloud-native infrastructure, and AI, with a focus on projects that improve real lives.
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Summary
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Software engineer building cloud and distributed systems. Former SDE Intern at AWS Backup; finishing a Master of Science in Computer Engineering at NYU (May 2027). Open to 2027 new-grad roles in backend, cloud and ML infrastructure.

Experience
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Amazon Web Services (AWS) — Software Development Engineer Intern, Data Protection
Jun 2026 – Aug 2026 · Seattle, WA

  • Eliminated manual data checks across 50M+ items for the on-call team by comparing daily snapshots in bulk and auto-filing tickets with diagnostic logs
  • Reduced redundant storage export cost by ~66% by consolidating per-consumer full-table exports into one shared workflow, removing duplicate work across all downstream pipeline consumers
  • Accelerated the daily reconciliation job ~20% by profiling table sizes and reordering its query to scan less data

KubeVirt (CNCF) — Open Source — Google Summer of Code 2025 Contributor
Jun 2025 – Aug 2025 · Remote

  • Sped up release validation by 25% by optimizing the build and CI/CD pipeline of KubeVirt, a 6,700-star CNCF project for running virtual machines on Kubernetes
  • Built a new Kubernetes Custom Resource (v1beta1) in Go with automatic reconciliation, backed by 20+ integration tests covering normal operation and failure recovery
  • Merged 6 production PRs, each resolving a tracked issue, working through public code review and design discussions with 90+ global contributors

ITS Partner – Signify (Philips) — Golang Developer
Aug 2024 – Mar 2025 · Astana, Kazakhstan

  • Reduced manual cloud operations by 94% by building a concurrent Go pipeline automating AWS S3 log transfers across 4,000+ IoT devices with retries and idempotency guarantees
  • Recovered 200+ engineering hours/month by building a script-runner for batch deployment workflows, improving release consistency across backend teams
  • Instrumented production workloads with OpenTelemetry and Datadog, giving the team full observability for the first time and catching AWS failures before customer impact

Education
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New York University — Master of Science in Computer Engineering
New York, NY — Aug 2025 – May 2027 · GPA: 3.72/4.0
Coursework: Machine Learning (A-), Deep Learning (A-), ML Systems & Ops (A-), Cloud Computing (A-), Internet Architecture (A-), Real-Time Embedded Systems (A)

Nazarbayev University — Bachelor of Science in Computer Science
Astana, Kazakhstan — Aug 2021 – Jun 2025 · GPA: 3.1/4.0
Coursework: Operating Systems, Data Structures & Algorithms, Software Engineering, Networks, Databases

Projects
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Solo Vault (team of 4, NYU Cloud Computing) — TypeScript, Python, AWS, Step Functions · GitHub
Mar 2026 – May 2026

  • Built the Step Functions indexing pipeline, Lambda handlers and CloudFormation deploy automation for a serverless AWS backend that gives an AI coding agent searchable project memory
  • Wrote the indexer’s unit and integration test suite and its bulk-indexing and pipeline benchmarking scripts
  • Co-authored an IEEE-style systems paper on the system: 12 CloudFormation stacks, dual KMS encryption, and a five-stage indexing pipeline

APRIL — Robot-Assisted Therapy Platform — Kubernetes, Go, Python, PostgreSQL
Sep 2024 – Mar 2026 · hrilab.kz/home

  • Scaled platform to 2,000+ children with autism across 7 therapy centers by architecting containerized microservices on Kubernetes with real-time REST APIs and a PostgreSQL-backed data layer
  • Built an AI pipeline (Anthropic + OpenAI) as Co-Lead & CPO that lets 12 non-technical therapists write robot behavior scripts in plain language, producing 400+ therapy interactions
  • Grew engineering org from 3 to 30 by establishing Agile workflows, CI/CD pipelines with GitHub Actions, and guild-based team structure across 5 product tracks

Technical Skills
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Languages: Go, Python, TypeScript, C++, SQL, Bash

AI & ML: Anthropic API, OpenAI API, RAG, PyTorch

Cloud & Infra: Distributed systems, AWS (S3, Lambda, ECS, Step Functions, DynamoDB, CloudFormation), Kubernetes, Docker, Terraform, Linux

Tools & Data: GitHub Actions, OpenTelemetry, Datadog, PostgreSQL, pgvector, Redis

Leadership & Involvement
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Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Student Chapter, Nazarbayev University — Head of Department (SIG)
Astana, Kazakhstan — Aug 2022 – May 2023

  • Mentored 20+ students in C++ by building and running a workshop curriculum from scratch as head of the SIG department

Languages
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Native: Russian, Kazakh
Fluent: English