Prem Buczkowski
Verified Expert in Engineering
Software Developer
Tokyo, Japan
Toptal member since May 27, 2022
Having worked for eight years as a Python and AWS software engineer, Prem developed a sensibility for the best practices for keeping the software maintainable. In his opinion, that is the most important thing for a freelancer. He combined this expertise with working as a researcher at a university, unifying the newest research with usable software, which is precisely the kind of project he's most excited about.
Portfolio
Experience
- Python - 10 years
- Linux - 10 years
- Amazon Web Services (AWS) - 8 years
- Django - 8 years
- Docker - 7 years
- PostgreSQL - 6 years
- Terraform - 6 years
- Computer Security - 3 years
Preferred Environment
Linux, PyCharm, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Python, Django, SQL, AWS IoT, Claude, AI-generated Code
The most amazing...
...thing I've developed is an implementation of an optimization algorithm. It was published as a paper and is written using best commercial practices.
Work Experience
Senior AWS Python Engineer
National Infrastructure and Service Transformation Authority
- Led transformation of Python analytics dashboards into enterprise web applications, implementing security controls, optimizing performance, and deploying via AWS ECS/Terraform infrastructure that scaled seamlessly to 100,000+ users on launch day.
- Discovered security issues in existing applications, avoiding a serious data breach.
- Established self-service deployment capabilities for data analysts through comprehensive training.
AWS Security Software Engineer
Keyless
- Moved an artificial intelligence-based user authentication model into an AWS Nitro confidential computing enclave.
- Enabled the company to process and store biometric data without having access to the images.
- Presented the workflow ensuring data confidentiality to the stakeholders.
GCP Python Data Engineer
Virgin Media O2
- Worked on a data migration from the IBM Netezza database to Google BigQuery.
- Designed and implemented a solution to ETL data from a firewalled on-prem server into GCP Cloud Storage, using Python, JavaScript, FastAPI, WebSockets, Google Cloud Run, and other related GCP services.
- Engaged in data archaeology, finding the data sources to make sure that the tables to be decommissioned were not used anymore.
Software Engineer (via Toptal)
Anjuna Security
- Built a high-level, reusable test suite for deploying confidential computing enclaves to the cloud using Kubernetes.
- Increased the confidence of our banking clients in our solution significantly by designing and implementing the continuous testing suite.
- Prepared documentation and tips for the test suite so it could be easily used and extended.
AWS Serverless Consultant
CirrusHQ
- Created an authentication library for Auth0 that was compatible with the serverless environment.
- Developed and designed a serverless back end for an exam provider using DynamoDB, Lambda, Terraform, Docker, and API Gateway.
- Designed the back end to scale out to millions of exams and exam takers, optimizing the AWS bill to be as small as possible.
Senior Python Developer
GGMR
- Implemented authentication for Django with an external OpenID Connect service.
- Migrated data from a WordPress instance to a Django database managed using PostgreSQL.
- Developed a back end of a Django CMS using Wagtail with GraphQL endpoints.
- Implemented a search back end using Elasticsearch so the users can query legacy and current services in the same search.
Research Assistant and Teaching Associate
Queen Mary University of London
- Created an interactive web application named CySecTool using Bokeh, NumPy, PuLP, and Git to present the optimization data and graphs interactively.
- Parallelized the algorithm, leading to significant improvements in the running time.
- Helped develop the security and authentication module. Prepared virtual machines to be attacked and defended by the students to learn practical security, along with related exercises and exam questions.
Lead Software Engineer
Founders4Schools
- Reduced charity running costs considerably by planning and performing a migration from Heroku to AWS.
- Modernized the codebase first from Python 2.6 to Python 3.6 and then to Python 3.10.
- Performed the database normalization and optimization for the significantly increased number of users.
- Mentored junior developers and taught them how to contribute independently.
Python Freelance Developer
Chihiro Software
- Developed an in-house library from scratch to speed up data ingestion. Thanks to that, we progressed from processing one dataset every three days when I joined to processing three sites every day when the project ended.
- Created a Firefox and Chrome extension for storing and retrieving cookies matching credentials.
- Administered Linux servers with over 10,000 monthly unique visitors.
Experience
Scalable Bi-level Multi-objective Cybersecurity Optimization Over Probabilistic Attack Graphs
A case study was performed in cooperation with the National Cyber Security Centre, UK. I analyzed the security of a middle-sized industrial provider.
The project led to a publication, and I was its main author:
• https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3510547.3517919.
Education
Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science
Queen Mary University of London - London, UK
Certifications
AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional
Amazon Web Services
AWS Certified Developer
Amazon Web Services
AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate
Amazon Web Services
Red Hat Certified System Administrator
Red Hat
Skills
Libraries/APIs
Django ORM, Beautiful Soup, SQLAlchemy, React, Requests, NumPy, WebExtensions API, Intel SGX, Pydantic, Node.js
Tools
Terraform, GitHub, Amazon Elastic Container Registry (ECR), Cron, Auth0, Claude, PyCharm, Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS), Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS), AWS SDK, Beanstalk, Ansible, Git, Amazon EKS, AWS Key Management Service (KMS), Pytest, Apache Airflow, BigQuery, Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), Celery, NGINX
Languages
GraphQL, Python, Go, Bash, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, SQL, SCSS, PHP, Python 3, C++, C#, Java, TypeScript
Frameworks
Django, Selenium, Django REST Framework, Flask, JSON Web Tokens (JWT), Angular, Chrome, Scrapy
Platforms
Linux, Docker, Amazon Web Services (AWS), AWS IoT, Apache Arrow, Jupyter Notebook, Red Hat Linux, AWS ALB, WordPress, Heroku, Firefox, Amazon EC2, AWS Lambda, Kubernetes, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Cloud Run, AWS Nitro System
Storage
Redis, JSON, Elasticsearch, PostgreSQL, MySQL, Google Cloud, Databases, Data Pipelines, Amazon S3 (AWS S3), Amazon DynamoDB, Netezza, Cloud Firestore, NoSQL
Paradigms
ETL, Unit Testing, Testing, Automated Testing, Microservices, Event-driven Architecture, Parallel Programming, Dependency Injection, Microservices Architecture
Industry Expertise
Cybersecurity
Other
APIs, FastAPI, Back-end, CI/CD Pipelines, Back-end Development, Cloud Applications, Web Applications, Cloud Infrastructure, Web Scraping, API Integration, Scraping, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Parquet, Data Scraping, Agentic AI, Large Language Models (LLMs), Machine Learning, Distributed Architecture, Platform as a Service (PaaS), CMS, Okta, AI-generated Code, Amazon Bedrock, Computer Science, Wagtail CMS, Bokeh, Graph Theory, Computer Security, Chrome Extensions, Firefox Extensions, Serverless, Amazon RDS, Architecture, Data Engineering, Data Science, WebSockets, Google BigQuery, Async Batch Processes, IT Security, Load Balancers, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), Site Reliability, GitHub Actions, Conda, Networking, Channels, Goroutines, Concurrency, AI Agents
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