
Akif Patel
Verified Expert in Engineering
Cryptography Developer
New York, NY, United States
Toptal member since June 25, 2021
Akif co-founded and was CTO of a Y Combinator-backed fintech startup. He's a skilled developer with experience in full-stack web, automation engineering, and mobile development. Due to Akif's intensive involvement in competitive programming, he's very knowledgeable about data structures and algorithms.
Portfolio
Experience
- Python - 6 years
- JavaScript - 5 years
- Flask - 5 years
- Cryptography - 5 years
- C++ - 4 years
- Data Structures - 3 years
- Competitive Programming - 3 years
- Algorithms - 3 years
Preferred Environment
Linux, Vim Text Editor, Ubuntu, Git
The most amazing...
...thing I've achieved is reaching the ICPC World Finals (competitive programming).
Work Experience
CTO
TreasuryViewer
- Developed an app for users to buy bonds from the US government. Sold >$5 billion in bonds last year.
- Scraped multiple government sites for data and developed bots that ran directly on mobile phones to execute user orders.
- Wrote a Flutter and TypeScript engine using a custom JavaScript toolchain and parsers to live-push scraping and algorithm code.
- Created multiple LLM tools to analyze bond offerings and other financial documents for user research.
Software Engineer
Grayslate Capital
- Built a trading bot for binary options/event contracts that arbitraged between different exchanges.
- Helped with the backtesting framework, using Pandas and Zipline.
- Wrote the scraping code to be able to get prices and trade on exchanges without APIs.
Software Engineering Intern
MealMe
- Improved MealMe's scraping technologies using my reverse engineering and CTF skills.
- Scraped multiple food delivery services for all their restaurants in the US using AWS clusters for menu and restaurant info.
- Prepossessed (and merged them across services) and compiled these into a MongoDB database. Used algorithms and machine learning to make a search engine on them for restaurants and food delivery.
- Created the entire internal customer support, including in-app chat, for MealMe.
Research
DIMACS
- Performed research in the area of data structures and cryptography under Martin Farach-Colton.
- Worked on making a key-value store on a disk that is authenticated and secure.
- Researched how to make Merkle Tree constructions more efficient for verifying traversals of different types of graphs.
- Applied these results to B^epsilon trees and the BetrFS filesystem.
Software Engineering Intern
- Wrote a part of a pipeline in C++ and Flume to process hundreds of billions of data signals and categorize anomalies.
- Made a web dashboard for visualizing and monitoring information about these anomalies.
- Integrated this dashboard to automatically alert teams at Google about anomalies in their data sources.
Cloud and Mobile Developer
Flyermatch
- Wrote a framework to scrape grocery flyers from various grocery chains in Canada.
- Used Google Cloud Platform to run image recognition and document analysis to extract the deals for that grocery store.
- Worked on integrating this framework with the back-end Python server.
- Coded the first iteration of the Android app to display deals and allow searching and clipping.
Software Developer
Kidnetic
- Wrote a web app to allow parents, who were dropping their kids off, to enter their personal information into and sign an electronic waiver form.
- Made the admin side to allow searching and aggregation of waiver data.
- Created a script that formatted the data for any given waiver into a PDF and allowed the admin to download it.
Experience
SuperWires
https://pypi.org/project/SuperWires/Modelfire
https://gitlab.com/maltysen/modelfireSupremo
https://gitlab.com/maltysen/supremoHtml Parser
https://gitlab.com/maltysen/htmlparserpwsheet
• Multiple users with access to the same set of credentials
• Encrypted at rest
• Full audit log of events to track any changes for observability
• Built-in otp/authenticator 2FA for the logins in the manager
• Google SSO
We used this internally at TreasuryViewer.
StackTalk
https://devpost.com/software/slacktalkPypartial
https://pypi.org/project/pypartial/BrainFreeze
https://github.com/Maltysen/Brain-FreezeDagboard
https://gitlab.com/maltysen/dagboardNodes can have dependencies on other nodes, and you can track task completion based on those dependencies. All changes sync in real-time across clients.
Written in TypeScript and uses a simple custom SPA framework. Utilizes cytoscape.js for visualization, and Firebase Realtime Database for storage and collaboration.
Education
Bachelor's Degree (In Progress) in Computer Engineering
Rutgers University - New Brunswick
Skills
Libraries/APIs
jQuery, Pygame, Node.js, SQLAlchemy, React, REST APIs, Pandas, Zipline, TensorFlow, Socket.IO, Reddit API, Pydantic, Cytoscape.js
Tools
Vim Text Editor, Flume, Bazel, Crawlera, Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS), Git, Expo, GTK, GNOME, Firebase Security Rules, Rollup
Languages
C++, Python, JavaScript, Python 3, TypeScript, C, SQL, Haskell, Clojure, CoffeeScript, Java, GraphQL, HTML5, HTML
Frameworks
Flask, Flutter, Angular, Django, Bootstrap, CherryPy, Flex, Google Test, Yesod, OAuth 2
Platforms
Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Firebase, Android, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google App Engine, Heroku, Linux, Ubuntu, iOS, OTP
Industry Expertise
Web Design
Paradigms
Functional Programming, Model Context Protocol (MCP)
Storage
MongoDB, Redis, Databases, Cloud Firestore, Firebase Realtime Database
Other
Cryptography, Algorithms, Data Structures, Capture the Flag (CTF), Competitive Programming, Reverse Engineering, Scraping, Abstract Algebra, Games, Chrome Extensions, Web Scraping, Graph Theory, Complexity Theory, PDF, SIMD, Static Analysis, WebSockets, Operating Systems, Graphics, Speech Recognition, Natural Language Processing (NLP), Machine Learning, Image Recognition, Generative Pre-trained Transformers (GPT), Artificial Intelligence (AI), Google Play Store, App Store, Large Language Models (LLMs), HTML Parsing, Parsers, Tokenization, FIX Protocol, Google Sign-in, Two-factor Authentication (2FA), LangChain
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