Currently
Software Engineer — Data & AI
Awash Bank · Core Systems — Data & AI
Identity harmonisation, forex automation and audit platforms running daily across the branch network.
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Open to senior engineering and AI rolesAddis Ababa, Ethiopia
Abebayehu
Alaro
I build the data pipelines, backend platforms and machine-learning services that banks and public institutions run on — and I'm building sovereign AI infrastructure for Ethiopia.
Incubating
Sovereign AI infrastructure: scalable, local, privacy-first.
- Daily users served
- 10k+
- Across the Awash Bank branch network
- Processing latency
- −50%
- On mission-critical verification services
- Verification errors
- −40%
- After identity harmonisation went live
- CGPA / 4.00
- 3.94
- Gold Medalist, BSc Software Engineering
- Java
- Spring Boot
- Python
- FastAPI
- PyTorch
- TensorFlow
- TypeScript
- Next.js
- Angular
- OpenCV
- Docker
- Kubernetes
- Kafka
- PostgreSQL
- GitLab CI
Selected work
Systems in production
Six platforms spanning data engineering, backend systems, MLOps and computer vision — most of them running daily inside Ethiopia's largest private bank. Each case study covers the problem, the architecture and the trade-offs I made.
Showing 6 projects.
Data Engineering
2024 — Present
National Identity Data Harmonisation
Unified core-banking KYC records with biometric national ID data into a single, queryable identity graph serving every branch in the network.
Awash Bank · Core Systems
- Latency
- −50%
- Daily users
- 10k+
- Verification errors
- −40%
- Spring Boot
- Next.js
- Python
- Transformers
- CNN
- +2
View case study
Backend Systems
2024
Forex Requisition & Approval Platform
End-to-end forex platform covering eligibility checks, cash requisition, complaint escalation and master card issuance, wired directly into core banking.
Awash Bank · Core Systems
- Turnaround
- −50%
- Customers served
- 1,500+
- Eligibility paths
- 4
- Spring Boot
- Next.js
- Django
- Document AI
- PrimeReact
- +3
View case study
Backend Systems
2023
Audit Finding Reporting & Management
Consolidated 45+ audit categories from IS, management, inspection and branch audits into one repository with event-driven notifications and granular access control.
Awash Bank · Core Systems
- Audit categories
- 45+
- Rectification rate
- +45%
- Roles
- 20+
- Spring Framework
- Spring Security
- Angular
- PrimeNG
- SQL
- +1
View case study
MLOps
2024
PharmAssist — Prescription OCR Pipeline
Turns handwritten medical prescriptions into structured, validated healthcare data through a chained segmentation → recognition → NLP-correction pipeline.
AbaNexus AI · Applied research
- Recognition accuracy
- 90%
- Architecture
- Hybrid
- Inference
- Real-time
- FastAPI
- PyTorch
- Mask R-CNN
- MobileViT
- OpenCV
- +2
View case study
Backend Systems
2023
Loan Management System
Loan origination and servicing platform for NGO staff, integrated directly with core banking and real-time notifications.
Awash Bank · Core Systems
- Processing
- Real-time
- Roles
- 4+
- Spring Framework
- Spring Security
- Angular
- SQL
- T-SQL
- +2
View case study
Computer Vision
2021
Facial Recognition Attendance System
Award-winning attendance platform that recognises multiple faces simultaneously in a live video stream, with a manual fallback for real classroom conditions.
BSc thesis · Wolkite University
- Recognition
- Multi-face
- Award
- Best of Year
- Roles
- 4
- Python
- OpenCV
- TensorFlow
- MTCNN
- Django
- +1
View case study
Technical expertise
What I actually build with
Grouped by the problems they solve rather than by logo wall. Everything listed here has shipped to a production system I was responsible for.
Backend & Distributed Systems
Enterprise services that hold up under regulatory load — workflow engines, RBAC, integration with core banking, and the audit trails that make them defensible.
- Java
- Spring Boot
- Spring Security
- FastAPI
- Django
- REST API design
- JWT / OAuth2
- Event-driven workflows
- Microservices
Data Engineering
High-throughput ETL and record reconciliation across systems that were never designed to agree with each other.
- ETL pipeline design
- SQL / T-SQL
- PostgreSQL
- Data harmonisation
- Entity resolution
- Kafka
- Query optimisation
- Reporting pipelines
Machine Learning & MLOps
Training, serving and operating models in production — with versioning, thresholds that operations can tune, and monitoring that catches drift.
- PyTorch
- TensorFlow
- Transformers
- Model serving
- Inference optimisation
- CI/CD for ML
- Docker
- Kubernetes
- Experiment tracking
Computer Vision & Applied AI
Detection, recognition and OCR pipelines built for real conditions rather than clean benchmarks.
- OpenCV
- CNN architectures
- MTCNN
- Mask R-CNN
- MobileViT
- Face recognition
- OCR pipelines
- KenLM / SymSpell
Product & Frontend
Operator-grade interfaces: dense data, fast search, and workflows that a reviewer can drive all day without friction.
- TypeScript
- React
- Next.js
- Angular
- Tailwind CSS
- PrimeReact / PrimeNG
- Accessibility (WCAG)
- Design systems
Platform & Delivery
The unglamorous half of shipping: pipelines, containers, environments, and release processes that do not wake anyone up.
- Docker
- Kubernetes
- GitLab CI/CD
- Linux
- Git
- Jasper Reports
- Monitoring & logging
- Technical documentation
Career history
Experience & education
From lecturing and applied research to shipping regulated systems inside Ethiopia's largest private bank.
2022
Present
Sept 2022 — Present
National-scale AI & full-stack deliverySoftware Engineer — Data & AI
Awash BankAddis Ababa, EthiopiaEngineering the data infrastructure, backend platforms and machine-learning services behind Ethiopia's largest private bank.
- Architected high-volume ETL pipelines that unify core-banking records with national identity data into a single source of truth.
- Deployed deep-learning models for biometric verification into a regulated production environment, with audit trails over every automated decision.
- Cut verification errors by 40% and processing latency by 50%, serving more than 10,000 daily users across the branch network.
- Standardised the MLOps lifecycle — CI/CD pipelines, containerised services, RBAC and audit logging — across the team.
- Delivered enterprise platforms end to end, including Loan Management, Forex Requisition and Audit Finding Reporting.
- Java
- Spring Boot
- FastAPI
- Next.js
- Angular
- SQL / T-SQL
- TensorFlow
- PyTorch
- OpenCV
- Docker
- Kubernetes
- GitLab CI/CD
2021
2022
Oct 2021 — Nov 2022
Academic leadership & mentorshipLecturer & Researcher
Wolkite UniversityWolkite, EthiopiaTurning theoretical computer science into applied practice, and mentoring the engineers who come next.
- Taught core software engineering and advanced computer science courses at undergraduate level.
- Supervised capstone projects across the full SDLC, with a focus on applied AI.
- Ran technical workshops and coding sessions to prepare students for industry.
- Mentored undergraduates through research, competitive programming and career planning.
- Python
- C++
- Django
- System Design
- Research Methods
2017
2021
2017 — 2021
Gold Medalist · CGPA 3.94/4.00BSc in Software Engineering
Wolkite UniversityWolkite, EthiopiaGraduated top of class, combining academic distinction with applied AI research.
- CGPA 3.94 / 4.00 — Gold Medalist and Valedictorian.
- Thesis: real-time facial recognition attendance system built with OpenCV and CNNs.
- Awarded Best Industrial Project of the Year for applied AI innovation.
- Python
- OpenCV
- TensorFlow
- Java
- Deep Learning
- Django
Recognition
Awards & credentials
Academic distinction, applied-research awards, and the production record behind them.
Gold Medalist & Valedictorian
Wolkite University · 2021
Graduated first in the Software Engineering cohort with a CGPA of 3.94 / 4.00.
Best Industrial Project of the Year
Wolkite University · 2021
Awarded for the Facial Recognition Attendance System — applied computer vision deployed in a real classroom setting.
BSc in Software Engineering
Wolkite University · 2017 — 2021
Thesis on real-time multi-face recognition using OpenCV and convolutional neural networks.
Production systems at national scale
Awash Bank · 2022 — Present
Shipped and operates identity, forex, audit and loan platforms used daily across the branch network.
Strategic direction
Research & roadmap
Where I'm taking the work next: past prototypes, towards sovereign AI systems that public institutions can actually operate and audit.
- Research focus
Knowledge-Driven AI
Turning fragmented banking and biometric datasets into structured identity graphs — the substrate that makes transparency, compliance and semantic integration possible at national scale.
- Knowledge graphs
- NLP
- Entity resolution
- Data harmonisation
- Technical vision
Resource-Aware ML
Training and serving strategies for low-resource environments. Most production AI in this region has to run on constrained hardware, and efficiency is a correctness requirement, not an optimisation.
- Model optimisation
- Quantisation
- Inference serving
- Efficiency
- Strategic goal
Sovereign AI Infrastructure
Distributed AI systems for public-sector and financial institutions with governance, compliance and resilience designed into every layer — data that stays local, decisions that stay auditable.
- Governance
- Compliance
- Distributed systems
- Data residency
Immediate objective
Scaling national AI systems with measurable, auditable impact
Building on identity harmonisation, forex automation and audit platforms delivered at Awash Bank, my next focus is deepening distributed systems and compliance-driven architecture — so that sovereign AI in Ethiopia is engineered to the same standard as the financial infrastructure it will sit beside.
Career focus
AI Engineer · Backend & full-stack
Get in touch
Let's build something that lasts
Open to senior engineering and AI roles, and to collaborations on distributed systems, MLOps and sovereign AI. The fastest way to reach me is email.
I read everything and reply to anything concrete — roles, collaborations, or a hard systems problem you're stuck on.
Based in
Addis Ababa, Ethiopia
9.0122° N · 38.7569° E
- Local time
- —
- Availability
- Open to roles