Dennis Muticia

Senior Software Engineer & Technical Lead

Visionary Engineering Leader with 10+ years driving cross-functional teams to deliver large-scale, cloud-native systems. Expert at architecting secure microservices on Azure, GCP, and AWS, and at orchestrating Agile transformations that elevate velocity & quality.

Interests: Poetry, Lawn Tennis, Muay Thai , Hiking 📜 🎾🤼‍♂️🏞️

Skills

Software Engineering

Python

TypeScript

JavaScript

Node.js

NestJS

Java

Spring Boot

.NET

OOP

System design

SQL

NoSQL

VectorDB

Microservices

Docker

Kubernetes

AWS

GCP

Azure

Web App security

Application Performance Monitoring (APM)

AI Engineering

PyTorch

TensorFlow

Computer Vision

LangChain

Prompt Engineering

NLP

LLMs

RAG

MLOps

AWS SageMaker

Vertex AI

Federated Learning

Team & Leadershp

Agile Leadership

Scrum

Kanban

Cross-Team Collaboration

Coaching (GROW model)

Mentorship

Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC)

Budget & Resource Allocation

Conflict Resolution & Decision-Making

Event Organizing

Education

MSc in Computer Science (Artificial Intelligence)

University of South Dakota

BSc in Computer Technology

Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology

Projects / Research

Material Message Box

WPF MaterialDesign MessageBox with customizable themes, RTL support & clipboard copy functionality.

Distributed Data Pipeline

Event-driven microservices with React, NestJS, FastAPI & NATS JetStream, deployed via Docker, Kubernetes & Terraform.

AI Skills Classification

Semi-supervised ML for classifying AI-related skills in imbalanced job postings with TF-IDF, Word2Vec & BERT embeddings, achieving 98% accuracy.

Sports Action Recognition

Temporal sequence modeling using LSTM, GRU, 3D-CNN & pre-trained InceptionV3/VGG16 on the UCF101 dataset.

Portfolio Optimisation

Developed a modular DRL framework for automated portfolio management using FinRL and Stable-Baselines3 across five RL algorithms: A2C, PPO, SAC, DDPG and TD3.

Federated Learning BFT

Benchmarking FedAvg, Krum & Trimmed Mean under Byzantine attacks in a Python-based FL simulation.

Grover's Algorithm

Implemented Grover's search algorithm on IBM Q using Qiskit, demonstrating quadratic speedup.

Work Experience

Jan 2024 - May 2025

Graduate Researcher (Artificial Intelligence)

University of South Dakota

Built a RAG-based video search engine using LlamaIndex, PAISS embeddings, and Pinecone, boosting contextual query accuracy by 30%
Developed a semi-supervised model (98% accuracy) for classifying AI-related skills in imbalanced job postings using TF-IDF, Word2Vec, BERT, and ensemble methods.
Designed temporal classifiers (LSTM, GRU, CNNs, Inception V3, VGG16) for action recognition on UCF101 using transfer learning.
Evaluated Byzantine-robust aggregation strategies (FedAvg, Krum, Trimmed Mean), demonstrating Krum's superior performance for secure distributed training.
Implemented Grover's algorithm in Qiskit, demonstrating quantum speedup for unstructured search.

Python

PyTorch

TensorFlow

NLP Research

Computer Vision

Reinforcement Learning

Feb 2022 - Dec 2023

Senior Software Engineer

Dash Solutions Inc, New York, USA

Led Wallet API microservice project on AWS; shipped first iteration in two months.
Migrated core Spring Boot API to Redis distributed cache on AWS ElasticCache.
Implemented AWS SQS priority queuing for real-time critical alerts.

Java

Spring Boot

AWS SQS

AWS Fargate

AWS Lambda

Redis

Apr 2021 - Feb 2022

Senior Software & DevOps Engineer

Smartmile Deutschland GmbH, Nagold, Germany

Developed Node.js APIs & React.js apps for parcel locker machines across Europe.
Trained team on Scrum; established bi-weekly sprint practices.
Optimized core APIs, improving latency by 20% via load testing.

Node.js

React.js

GCP

Google Cloud Run

Scrum

Load Testing

APM

Oct 2018 - Jan 2021

Tech Lead

Orteo Payment Systems Limited, Nairobi, Kenya

Orchestrated security-first microservice architecture and payment gateway.
Scaled from 2 engineers to 7 members across 3 functional teams.
Implemented agile across Dev, QA, DevOps & Cybersecurity, achieving 90–98% sprint delivery.
Spearheaded GRC strategy & secure banking integrations.

Microservices

Agile

GRC

Payment Gateway

Jun 2017 - Sep 2018

Software Engineer

eShare Ltd, Newbury, England

Implemented SonarQube static analysis; improved code quality from B+ to A.
Secured Docker ASP.NET & Angular apps via OWASP ZAP fixes.

SonarQube

Docker

Angular

Azure DevOps

Dec 2016 - Dec 2020

Chapter Organizer & Country Mentor

Google Developer Group, Nairobi, Kenya

Activated 7 new & reactivated 4 GDG chapters nationwide.
Led 10 Kenyan GDG leads to Google I/O 2017 (50% women).
Delivered 20+ talks & code labs, empowering 2000+ developers.

Community Leadership

Event Organizing

Public Speaking

Diversity & Inclusion

Jul 2016 - Dec 2016

Software Engineer

Virtual City Ltd, Nairobi, Kenya

Automated data ingestion tools with C#/WPF/SQL, cutting integration time by 85%.
Open-sourced Material UI WPF Message Box -> 20k+ NuGet downloads.

WPF

SQL

NuGet

Blog

Chart & code for RL portfolio optimization

Exploring Reinforcement Learning for Portfolio Optimization

Developed a modular DRL framework for automated portfolio management using FinRL/Stable-Baselines3. Implements multiple policy networks (MLP, EIIE, EI3) across five RL algorithms (A2C, PPO, SAC, DDPG, TD3) for asset allocation optimization on historical market data.

Federated learning schematic with security icons

Balancing Security & Efficiency in Federated Learning: Insights

An in-depth look at the trade-offs between robustness and performance in federated learning systems, with practical guidance on defending against Byzantine clients.

Community Mention: "Nairobi DevFest"

I'm featured in this DevFest Nairobi recap - check out the community highlights and a first-timer's perspective on Google Developer Group's flagship DevFest event.

Let's talk

Schedule a meeting with me