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Chijioke Ugwuanyi - Machine Learning Engineer & Researcher at Carnegie Mellon University

Basics

Name Chijioke Ugwuanyi
Label Machine Learning Engineer & Researcher
Email cugwuany@andrew.cmu.edu
Url https://github.com/xplorer1
Summary Senior software engineer and applied machine learning researcher with 7+ years building production systems across backend, data, and AI/ML. Currently pursuing M.Sc. in Information Technology at Carnegie Mellon University. Strong track record of end-to-end ownership, from design through implementation, testing, and deployment, in fast-paced environments. Experienced with distributed systems, data pipelines, AI agents, and building reliable platforms that deliver real customer impact.

Work

  • 2024.05 - Present
    Senior Software Engineer
    Diedev GmbH
    • Led 4-engineer team to deliver major product upgrade that increased company revenue by 35% within six months through improved feature delivery and system performance
    • Designed and deployed production API gateway in Rust handling 1,000+ RPS with sub-100ms p99 latency, implementing intelligent routing, rate limiting, and distributed tracing
    • Modernized critical Python 2 services to Rust, reducing build times by 60% and deployment frequency from weekly to daily releases
    • Built scalable backend services and data ingestion pipelines, taking end-to-end ownership from design through production rollout and monitoring
    • Improved CI/CD pipelines and observability infrastructure, enabling faster iteration cycles and smoother cross-team collaboration
    • Developed full-stack features using TypeScript and Python, contributing across backend APIs, data pipelines, and frontend interfaces
  • 2021.11 - 2024.07
    Senior Software Engineer
    Interswitch, Lagos, Nigeria
    • Architected and built automated reconciliation system processing 100K+ daily transactions, reducing manual operations overhead by 25% and eliminating error-prone spreadsheet workflows
    • Led technical scoping for enterprise clients alongside sales and product teams, translating business requirements into scalable solutions that closed 3 deals worth $200K+ combined
    • Established engineering documentation standards and onboarding program, reducing new hire ramp-up time from 8 weeks to 4 weeks
    • Built resilient, scalable features using Kafka/SQS messaging patterns for at-least-once delivery, ensuring data consistency across distributed services
    • Implemented comprehensive logging, metrics, and tracing for operational excellence, maintaining high standards for documentation and enabling 40% faster incident resolution
    • Owned full lifecycle of data infrastructure—from schema design and pipeline architecture through deployment, monitoring, and scaling to handle growing transaction volumes
    • Worked cross-functionally with product, infrastructure, and data teams to design data models and ingestion strategies for new transaction types
  • 2021.01 - 2021.11
    Software Engineer
    Minerva Technologies, Nigeria
    • Designed and built internal admin platform with role-based access control and audit logging, enabling support teams to independently resolve 90% of merchant issues without engineering escalation
    • Developed automated merchant transaction reversal system using event-driven architecture, increasing support throughput by 50%+ and reducing average resolution time from 2 hours to 15 minutes
    • Shipped backend APIs and frontend features for fintech application serving 3M+ users, implementing payment processing, user authentication, and transaction history
    • Built machine learning pipeline for digital identity verification and fraud detection using scikit-learn and custom feature engineering, reducing merchant verification steps and time by at least 2 hours per day
    • Thrived in fast-paced startup environment, staying focused as priorities shifted and shipping scalable systems weekly with strong testing and code quality standards
  • 2017.06 - 2021.11
    Software Engineer
    Adbasador Media Limited, Nigeria
    • Built content management and delivery platform serving 50K+ daily active users, implementing caching strategies that reduced API response times by 40% and improved user engagement
    • Led AWS cloud migration for monolithic application, implementing containerized microservices with CI/CD pipelines that reduced deployment downtime from 2 hours to under 10 minutes
    • Developed real-time analytics dashboard and reporting tools using TypeScript/React and PostgreSQL, enabling business teams to track KPIs and make data-driven decisions
    • Architected, designed, developed, and maintained 3 software solutions, re-engineering existing software quality to decrease page load times to less than 1 second
    • Created optimized implementation plans ensuring smooth rollout resulting in 50% productivity enhancement; analyzed business processes and software requirements for implementation across multiple solutions

Volunteer

  • 2024.09 - 2025.10

    Carnegie Mellon University Africa

    Vice President Education
    TechyTalkers Toastmasters Club
    • Organized meetings, assigned speech roles, and ensured members progress through their educational pathways
    • Connected new members with mentors, tracked individual progress, and recognized member achievements
    • Created the meeting schedules, planned contests, and ensured high-quality learning experiences
  • 2024.01 - 2024.07

    Lagos, Nigeria

    Volunteer
    The Lagos Food Bank Initiative
    • Facilitated outreaches and workshops on food distribution to indigent communities in Lagos, Nigeria
    • Community outreach and social impact initiatives
  • 2024.01 - 2025.12

    Carnegie Mellon University Africa

    Member
    Data Science Club, CMU-Africa
    • Led a team to participate in the Disability AI Hackathon where we used disability datasets to build solutions for disabled people in Africa
    • Came out in the top 5 in the hackathon competition
    • Applied machine learning and data science skills to address social challenges

Education

  • 2024.08 - 2025.12

    Pittsburgh, PA

    M.Sc.
    Carnegie Mellon University
    Information Technology
    • Machine Learning
    • AI Research
    • Computer Vision
    • MLOps
  • 2015.09 - 2019.11

    Nsukka, Nigeria

    B.Sc.
    University of Nigeria
    Biological and Data Science
    • Data Science
    • Biology
    • Statistics
    • Research Methods

Skills

Programming Languages
Python
TypeScript
JavaScript
Java
Rust
C/C++
SQL
Bash/Shell
Machine Learning & AI
PyTorch
TensorFlow
NumPy
Pandas
Scikit-learn
XGBoost
Computer Vision
Adversarial ML
LLMs
Multi-Agent Systems
RAG Systems
Backend & Web Development
Express.js
Spring Boot
FastAPI
Node.js
REST APIs
WebSocket
Microservices
Event-Driven Architecture
Frontend Development
React
Next.js
HTML/CSS
Responsive UI
Real-time Streaming
Data Engineering
PostgreSQL
Kafka
Redis
Data Pipelines
ETL Workflows
Event-Driven Systems
Infrastructure & DevOps
AWS
Docker
Kubernetes
CI/CD
GitHub Actions
Jenkins
Monitoring
Distributed Tracing
Software Engineering Practices
System Architecture
API Development
Database Design
End-to-End Ownership
Agile/Scrum
Test-Driven Development

Languages

English
Native speaker
Igbo
Native speaker

Interests

Machine Learning
Adversarial Robustness
Computer Vision
MLOps
AI Safety
Research
AI Research
Computer Science
Data Science
Human-Computer Interaction

Projects

  • 2024.01 - 2024.12
    Hoppscotch API Live Sync
    Production-ready feature for automatic API collection synchronization, enabling code-first API development workflow. Built intelligent framework detection for 7+ frameworks with real-time polling and persistent sync state.
    • Open source contribution to Hoppscotch
    • Intelligent framework detection (FastAPI, Express, Spring Boot, ASP.NET, Django, Flask, Rails, Laravel)
    • Real-time polling with content hashing for change detection
    • Service-oriented architecture with TypeScript
    • Solved complex technical challenges including path parameter normalization and persistence
    • Wrote comprehensive 6-part blog series documenting implementation
  • 2024.01 - 2024.12
    AI Village - Multi-Agent GitHub Issue Fixer
    Real-time multi-agent system demonstrating LLM collaboration for fixing open-source GitHub issues. Implemented WebSocket streaming architecture with React frontend and FastAPI backend.
    • Multi-LLM roundtable debate system with three distinct AI personas
    • WebSocket streaming for instant UI updates during LLM inference
    • Scout agent for GitHub issue discovery and analysis
    • Human-in-the-loop review panel for quality control
    • Evolved from Streamlit proof-of-concept to production-ready React + FastAPI system
    • Integrated Ollama API for local and remote LLM inference
  • 2024.01 - 2024.12
    Evaluating Model Robustness to Adversarial Attacks
    Research on CIFAR-10 and VGGFace2 that revealed ResNet-50 models drop from 87% to 9% accuracy under FGSM attacks, but adversarial training can recover 55% robustness.
    • Adversarial robustness research on CIFAR-10 and VGGFace2 datasets
    • Evaluated pretrained CNNs (ResNet-50, VGG16, MobileNetV2, EfficientNet)
    • Implemented white-box and black-box attack scenarios
    • Demonstrated adversarial training effectiveness
    • Compared resilience across different model architectures
  • 2024.01 - 2024.12
    Multimodal Emotion Recognition
    Designed and evaluated deep learning models combining audio, visual, and textual signals to improve emotion recognition robustness.
    • Multimodal learning combining audio, video, and text signals
    • End-to-end experimentation pipelines using Python and TensorFlow
    • Rapid iteration on model architectures
    • Analysis of trade-offs between complexity, accuracy, and real-world usability
  • 2024.01 - 2024.12
    MLOps Pipeline - End-to-End Data Engineering
    Engineered comprehensive data engineering pipeline including data ingestion, orchestration, transformation, and analysis for production ML systems.
    • Scalable data processing workflows with proper error handling
    • Data validation, quality checks, and transformation pipelines
    • Production-ready ML system infrastructure
  • 2024.01 - 2024.12
    AI-Assisted Coding Productivity Study
    Conducted controlled self-experiment comparing AI-assisted and manual coding workflows, analyzing impacts on productivity, cognitive load, and learning outcomes.
    • Controlled experimental design
    • Productivity and cognitive load analysis
    • Understanding developer interaction with AI tools
  • 2023.01 - 2023.12
    Comparative Analysis of Classification Models
    Research to identify the best machine learning model for loan approval prediction based on accuracy and area under curve metrics.
    • Evaluated Logistic Regression, Random Forest, SVM, KNN, MLP, and XGBoost
    • Performance comparison using accuracy and AUC metrics
    • Cross-validation and model selection
  • 2023.01 - 2023.12
    Plaid Shell Implementation
    Implemented a fully featured Linux shell from scratch using C programming language, including command parsing, process management, job control, and I/O redirection.
    • Systems programming in C
    • Command parsing and execution
    • Process management and job control
    • I/O redirection and piping
    • Understanding of Unix internals