
Kevin Muthiani
Verified Expert in Engineering
AI, Cloud, and Back-end Developer
Nairobi, Nairobi County, Kenya
Toptal member since February 18, 2022
Kevin is a backend and platform engineer with 7 years building production Python systems on AWS and GCP: FastAPI, Django, PostgreSQL, Docker, Terraform and CI/CD, including LLM features utilizing Amazon Bedrock. He spent nearly three years at a leading US AI research lab producing training data for a frontier model's coding capability, leading seven engineers across five continents. AWS Certified Solutions Architect; Terraform Associate.
Portfolio
Experience
- PostgreSQL - 7 years
- Django - 7 years
- Docker - 7 years
- Amazon Web Services (AWS) - 7 years
- Python - 7 years
- Terraform - 5 years
- FastAPI - 4 years
- Amazon Bedrock - 3 years
Work Experience
Technical Co-Founder
Ketha Africa
- Designed and built back-ends for platforms connecting smallholder farmers with aggregators and processors, running FastAPI and Django services on AWS.
- Containerized the platform with Docker and built automated GitLab CI/CD pipelines across every service repository, replacing manual releases with repeatable, reviewable deploys.
- Provisioned and managed AWS infrastructure as code with Terraform, using Lambda for event-driven work to keep running costs inside a startup budget.
- Integrated Amazon Bedrock to extract structured data and generate insight summaries and bespoke reports.
- Built a conversational assistant on Amazon Bedrock that answers user questions against platform data.
- Established engineering standards and ran recurring architecture and code reviews across the Django, FastAPI and infrastructure repositories, mentoring the engineering team on testing and API design.
AI Engineer
Frontier AI Research Lab
- Produced human preference and demonstration data used to fine-tune a frontier LLM’s coding and tool-use capability, across 12+ campaigns spanning Python, SQL, Java, C++, C#, TypeScript and R.
- Authored reference code solutions as supervised fine-tuning demonstrations and graded model-generated code against explicit criteria, writing the rationales behind the scores.
- Wrote grading rubrics defining correctness, efficiency and style for model-generated code, and calibrated them across a distributed reviewer team to keep preference labels consistent.
- Authored multi-turn coding-assistant scenarios — code execution, debugging, web browsing and third-party plugins — including injected-failure cases used to probe recovery behavior.
- Reviewed and graded thousands of peer code submissions against campaign rubrics, acting as the quality gate before data was accepted into the training set.
- Led 7 engineers across 5 continents: weekly QC scoring, 1:1 task audits and written monthly performance reporting to program stakeholders.
Senior Back-end Developer
Cloudways Ltd
- Built and maintained Django REST APIs for a multi-tenant managed-hosting platform serving thousands of customers, bridging the customer-facing application to a GKE back end.
- Implemented enhancements to asynchronous operations, leading to smoother processes and an improved user experience.
- Developed reusable modules adopted across the team and proposed code best practices that were taken up platform-wide, improving maintainability.
- Joined an established codebase where a separate team owned the infrastructure and reviewed every PR, delivering inside existing architecture and conventions rather than refactoring around them.
- Collaborated with team members to troubleshoot and solve technical issues, improving the platform's stability.
- Assisted with on-boarding new developers on the project and provided technical support as needed.
Lead Back-end Developer
e.KRAAL Innovation Hub
- Prepared back-end engineering plans, which included back-end architecture, database schema, and time estimates for implementation by the team.
- Led the implementation of REST APIs for an agricultural collection and analytics application, a crowd-sourcing platform, and a sales and distribution application.
- Oversaw the resolution of bugs automatically reported on Sentry or raised by the QA team.
- Reviewed code for more than 200 merge requests within the back-end team.
DevOps Engineer
e.KRAAL Innovation Hub
- Configured and maintained a high availability six-node staging Docker Swarm cluster on AWS to support 5+ applications behind an nginx reverse proxy.
- Provisioned and managed a CloudFront CDN for a public website hosted on Amazon S3. Set up an automated CI/CD pipeline for the website using GitLab CI and the AWS Command Line Interface (CLI).
- Set up and maintained automated CI/CD pipelines into Docker clusters or CloudFront distributions using GitLab CI, Docker, and the AWS Command Line Interface (CLI).
- Developed an Ansible playbook to install and configure a Docker Swarm cluster on provisioned Linux machines.
- Managed an organizational Zimbra mail server hosted on Linode.
- Deployed and managed an on-premise Linux machine to host various applications using Citrix XenServer.
Junior Back-end Developer
e.KRAAL Innovation Hub
- Developed portions of REST APIs using the Django REST framework (DRF) for four projects, including a project management application, a building security monitoring system, and a video-conferencing application.
- Tracked and resolved bugs assigned to me on Sentry or through the internal project management system.
- Developed portions of asynchronous mobile SMS notifications. Integrated with a 3rd-party API to a local telecommunications provider.
Software Engineer Intern
e.KRAAL Innovation Hub
- Developed a Django REST API for an ELK-based network monitoring and anomaly detection system.
- Prepared Bash scripts for internal use in the installation and configuration of Packetbeat and Winlogbeat.
- Trained machine learning models to detect network traffic anomalies.
Project History
Cloudways Fully Managed Platform
Qazzi Crowd Sourcing
As the lead back-end developer for the project, I was tasked with overseeing software development to meet REST API requirements. The API was developed using Django Ninja (Python) and JSON Web Token (JWT) for user authentication.
I primarily worked on data models and API endpoints for authentication, data, billing, and product modules. I also configured the PostgreSQL database, Redis broker for async Celery workers, and Elasticsearch search and analytics containers on AWS. Integrated the API authentication service with a Google Identity Platform.
Additionally, I configured DevOps GitLab CI/CD pipelines with code quality checks, unit testing, the building of Docker images, and deployment to an AWS Cloud Docker swarm cluster behind the Nginx reverse proxy. Finally, I prepared a fault-tolerant production environment.
Horizon Sales and Distribution Solution
I oversaw software development to meet REST API requirements. The API service was developed using the Django REST framework (Python) and OAuth for user authentication.
I primarily developed the roles, dispatching, and accounting API modules. Then I configured PostgreSQL, Redis cache and broker, and Elasticsearch analytics containers on AWS. Additionally, I configured DevOps GitLab CI/CD pipelines completed with code quality checks, unit testing, the building of Docker images, and deployment to AWS.
Baraza Video Conferencing
I was part of the back-end software development team tasked with developing a REST API back end using Django REST framework (Python), PostgreSQL for data storage, and JWT for authentication.
I installed and configured an OpenVidu server using Docker Compose on Azure to communicate with the back end and web microservices on AWS. Also, I programmed asynchronous tasks using Redis as a Celery message broker for mobile notifications, such as meeting schedules and OTPs for signup and password reset, through integration with a third-party telecommunication provider API. As a co-DevOps engineer for the project, I managed GitLab CI/CD pipelines that facilitated deployment to the AWS Cloud.
Ofisini
I worked as a back-end and DevOps developer on the tool, which comprised various modules such as project management, accounting, asset management, space bookings, and rota scheduling.
The project management module (core) featured a Web UI for planning, tracking, and discussing milestones, user stories, and bug tickets on a multi-stage board. This was integrated with a self-hosted GitLab instance to track related git branches, commits, and releases automatically.
Education
Bachelor's Degree in Electrical & Electronics Engineering
Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology - Nairobi, Kenya
Certifications
AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate
Amazon Web Services (AWS)
HashiCorp Certified: Terraform Associate
HashiCorp
Google Cloud Platform
Google Africa Developer Training Program
Certified Public Accountant I
KASNEB
Skills
Libraries/APIs
REST APIs, Python API, Django ORM, Auth, PubSubJS, Pydantic, OpenAPI, Google APIs, Pandas, Claude API
Tools
Docker Compose, Docker Swarm, Terraform, PyCharm, Git, GitLab CI/CD, Celery, Sentry, GitLab, AWS IAM, Amazon CloudFront CDN, Zimbra, Ansible, Certbot, Shell, Pytest, GitHub, Apache Avro, Postman, Jira, Jupyter, AI Prompts, Claude Agent SDK, Claude, NGINX, AWS Command Line Interface (CLI), PyPI, Kibana, ELK (Elastic Stack), Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), Elastic, RabbitMQ, Amazon CloudWatch, SendGrid, Claude Code
Languages
Python, Bash, SQL, Bash Script, Assembly, Regex, GraphQL, C, C++
Frameworks
Django, JSON Web Tokens (JWT), Django REST Framework, Django Ninja, OAuth 2, Swagger
Paradigms
REST, Object-relational Mapping (ORM), Database Design, DevOps, Microservices, Unit Testing, Agile, Object-oriented Programming (OOP), ETL
Platforms
Docker, Linux, DigitalOcean, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Amazon EC2, OTP, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Kubernetes, Azure, OpenVidu, Amazon Lightsail, XenServer, Mixpanel, AWS Lambda, Twilio, Jupyter Notebook, Arduino
Storage
JSON, Redis, PostgreSQL, Amazon S3 (AWS S3), Databases, RDBMS, Database Management Systems (DBMS), Elasticsearch, PostGIS, Google Cloud SQL, Google Cloud Datastore, Google Cloud Storage, MySQL, Relational Databases
Other
APIs, Back-end, YML, Software Engineering, API Design, SSL, AWS Certificate Manager, RESTful Microservices, Leadership, SMS, CI/CD Pipelines, Architecture, Google Cloud Functions, Google BigQuery, Identity & Access Management (IAM), Cloudflare, Software Architecture, Google, Infrastructure as Code (IaC), Cloud Services, Cloud Infrastructure, API Integration, Scripting, Costs, Programming, Serverless, FastAPI, Amazon Bedrock, AWS Secrets Manager, LLM Evaluation, Code Review, Rubric Design, Large Language Models (LLMs), Artificial Intelligence (AI), Video Conferencing, WebSockets, Channels, Machine Learning, Beats, Team Leadership, Video Streaming, OAuth, Financial Accounting, Cloud Architecture, Infrastructure Automation, Digital Electronics, Distributed Systems, Cryptography, Amazon RDS, Prompt Engineering, AI Engineering, AI Evaluation, Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF), Multi-tenant Architecture, Multi-tenant SaaS, SaaS, Technical Leadership
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