Krist Kokali, Developer in Tirana, Tirana County, Albania
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Krist Kokali

Verified Expert  in Engineering

Full-stack Developer

Tirana, Tirana County, Albania

Toptal member since September 7, 2021

Expertise
Back-end DevelopersPostgreSQLGolangAWSAlgorithmsAWS RDSJavaScriptNode.jsGitSQLExpress.jsDockerKubernetesTerraform
Bio

Krist is back-end engineer with four years of experience building scalable architectures, microservices, and cloud infrastructures. He worked for various organizations ranging from startups to global enterprises. Krist excels at team leadership, software development and architecture, and cloud computing.

Portfolio

Savvi
Go, Kubernetes, RabbitMQ, GraphQL, GitHub Actions, Authorization, Docker...
Gartner
Amazon RDS, Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS)...
National Agency for Information Society (AKSHI)
Node.js, Go, Microsoft Azure, Azure DevOps, Event-driven Architecture...

Experience

  • PostgreSQL - 4 years
  • Node.js - 4 years
  • Linux - 3 years
  • Go - 3 years
  • Terraform - 3 years
  • Software Architecture - 3 years
  • DevOps - 2 years

Availability

Full-time

Preferred Environment

Linux, MacOS

The most amazing...

...experience I've had is developing an end-to-end SaaS platform for small-sized businesses to promote their customer experience by rewarding e-vouchers.

Work Experience

Back-end Engineer

2022 - 2022
Savvi
  • Coded up to 15 new APIs on core microservices with an average P99 of 200 ms, which resulted in an improved user experience.
  • Implemented authorization across four microservices, increasing application security and developer experience.
  • Debugged and improved performance by up to 40% on two core microservices using tools such as pprof.
  • Refactored two legacy microservices for better readability and maintainability by applying clean architecture.
Technologies: Go, Kubernetes, RabbitMQ, GraphQL, GitHub Actions, Authorization, Docker, Microservices, Git, Back-end

Software Engineer

2021 - 2022
Gartner
  • Architected and developed a notification delivery system for two million daily active users using five different AWS services.
  • Deployed up to ten legacy and newly created back-end services using Terraform and Jenkins for CI/CD.
  • Created two deployment pipelines for the new upcoming serverless microservices.
  • Assisted in developing three new database systems by optimizing in-application SQL scripts.
Technologies: Amazon RDS, Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS), Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS), AWS Lambda, Java, Node.js, Amazon ElastiCache, Terraform, JavaScript, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Python, Redis

DevOps Engineer

2019 - 2021
National Agency for Information Society (AKSHI)
  • Designed and executed two custom software systems for the government with Node.js and Go that have more than 2,000 daily active users.
  • Built three customized CI/CD pipelines for deployment on Azure's public cloud and on-premise Kubernetes.
  • Automated two cloud and on-premise infrastructures by using GitOps and infrastructure as code (IaC).
  • Led cross-functional teams through the entire software development lifecycle for two services offered in the government portal.
Technologies: Node.js, Go, Microsoft Azure, Azure DevOps, Event-driven Architecture, Clean Architecture, DevOps, Azure App Service

Full-stack Developer

2018 - 2019
Freelance
  • Designed and developed an MVC service that increased customer engagement by 30% for all client chains of shops.
  • Rewrote the majority of two Node.js back-end services for efficiency and readability and added CI/CD, resulting in an increased developer agility of at least 20%.
  • Redesigned a search functionality for a food delivery service, which increased search usage by 50% within the first week of deployment.
Technologies: PostgreSQL, Node.js, Go, Event-driven Architecture, Azure, SQL, JavaScript

Experience

Loyalty App

A back-end system for loyalty programs that creates incentives through reward points, discounts, or membership cards for supermarket customers. By utilizing this application, customers were more motivated to interact with the seller, thus leading to higher conversion rates and higher revenue.

I was part of the back-end team that delivered the product to the supermarket chain and used Node.js, Express.js, Go, and Gorilla web toolkit as a stack.

Foreign Contributors Platform

A full-stack application that the government uses to receive contributions from their citizens living abroad.

I implemented and secured the back-end side abiding by government standards. Tools used to build this platform were Node.js, Express.js, React, and Terraform—to leverage GitOps.

The platform exceeded user engagement expectations in the first week of the initial deployment.

Real-time Movie Recommendations

A back-end service that aims to provide personalized movie recommendations for cinema-goers.

We were able to implement user-based and content-based recommendations for the cinema clients by utilizing a graph database (Neo4j) and a performant back-end with Gorilla.

This service was a companion to the main app used by the cinema, resulting in a higher engagement in the platform.

Education

2016 - 2019

Bachelor's Degree in Computer Engineering

Epoka University - Tirane, Albania

Skills

Libraries/APIs

Node.js, React

Tools

Terraform, Azure App Service, Keycloak, Git, Amazon ElastiCache, Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS), Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS), RabbitMQ

Languages

Go, JavaScript, SQL, TypeScript, Java, GraphQL, Python

Platforms

Amazon Web Services (AWS), Docker, Kubernetes, AWS Lambda, Azure, Visual Studio Code (VS Code), Linux, MacOS

Storage

PostgreSQL, Redis, Amazon DynamoDB, Neo4j, MongoDB

Frameworks

Express.js

Paradigms

Parallel Programming, Azure DevOps, Clean Architecture, Microservices, DevOps, REST, Event-driven Architecture

Other

Back-end, Data Structures, Algorithms, Microsoft Azure, APIs, Amazon RDS, Software Architecture, Software Engineering, GitHub Actions, Domain-driven Design (DDD), Serverless, Distributed Systems, Software as a Service (SaaS), Authorization

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