has 4+ years in software and builds the internal AI infrastructure at the International Bank of Azerbaijan. Before that, he wrote Python and Linux services for governmental institutions and led a team of teaching assistants at the State University of New York at Buffalo. Off the clock, he contributes to the world of open source software and maintains Rust tools of his own.
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AI Engineer @ ABB · International Bank of Azerbaijan
Head of IT @ European Youth Parliament AZ
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14 merged PRs·4+ yrs shipping·1000+ students taught·Colophon
Leading development of the bank's internal agentic platform, built for 4,000 employees
Isolated each agent action in a per-chat sandbox (NVIDIA OpenShell, Kata on OpenShift): no egress, Landlock, audit
Built a 28-case LLM-as-judge eval (memory, language, safety, skills, tools) with regression detection, Langfuse datasets and an emailed report; 28/28 passing as of Oct 2026, and it caught web search blocked on the bank network
Made it observable: Langfuse tracing per turn and GitLab CI with lint, ~1,700 backend tests and audit
Kept data in the bank: guardrails on web search, server-side spend and token limits, ETL into Postgres
Integrated LibreChat as the bank's chat front end with LDAP sign-in and service-desk forms in chat
Serves users in Azerbaijani, Russian and English
Write and send AI-Newsletter, a weekly issue since April 2026 to C-levels, departments and tribes: 17 issues so far
Feb 2026 – Present
Head of IT
European Youth Parliament Azerbaijan
Baku, Azerbaijan
Leading a team of 2 on the website and member tools; owning domains, hosting, email, access
Coordinating the website renewal, internal platform improvements, and new technology rollouts
Got the new website approved by the board before launch
Jan 2025 – Jan 2026
Software Engineer
Ministry of Defense of the Republic of Azerbaijan
Baku, Azerbaijan
Mandatory military service: built and maintained internal Linux and Python services (under NDA)
Oct 2024 – Nov 2024
Information and Communication Technology (ICT) Assistant
COP29 United Nations Climate Change Conference
Baku, Azerbaijan
Supported IT infrastructure for 500+ delegates under strict SLAs
Resolved real-time infrastructure and hybrid session incidents under strict availability requirements
Assisted with access control, device hardening, and secure system handling
Collaborated with vendors and technical teams to ensure uninterrupted operations
Aug 2022 – May 2024
Head Teaching Assistant: Data Structures
State University of New York at Buffalo
Buffalo, NY
Taught data structures and algorithms in Scala and Java to ~1000 students; managed 20 TAs
Coordinated course logistics with faculty
Oversaw grading with emphasis on academic integrity
Provided weekly reviews and debugging support to ~200 students
Sep 2021 – May 2023
Software Engineer (part-time)
EZ Pro Billing and Collection Inc.
New York, NY
Built Python and MongoDB backends: authentication and a task-based point allocation system
Optimized WebSockets for instant client sync; built ADA-compliant frontend components
Self-service app for a mobile operator that shows each subscriber, in manats, where they overpay and fixes it in one tap through Laya, a voice assistant in Azerbaijani and English. The Expo mobile client lives in a separate repo.
DjangoCeleryGeminiMilvusReact Native
Details
Built Laya, an LLM voice assistant that throws away any answer carrying a number the backend did not supply
Added usage insights: eight detectors read per-day and per-app usage, catch repeat pack buys, overage, unused data and short balances before renewal, and price the fix from the live catalogue as a card with a one-tap action
Built the Django REST backend: billing, tariffs, packs, SIM and credit products behind 86 documented endpoints, with one row-locked, idempotent code path for every balance change
Built Laya's plan, narrate and done endpoints: the LLM picks the intent and words the sentence, the backend supplies every number
Added a Gemini support assistant with a Milvus knowledge base and per-subscriber memory, streaming replies over SSE and answering voice notes with speech
Built the Expo / React Native client with on-device speech-to-text and TTS, running every voice task through the same code path as a manual tap
Tap a card on a USB NFC pad, pay inside the game window, get the item: tap-to-pay for desktop games built on Xsolla. Built at the Xsolla Baku GameTech Hackathon with a 5-person team.
RustTauriESP32XsollaWebSocket
Details
Built the Rust (axum) server: per-card spending limits, order creation against the Xsolla Pay Station sandbox, API key kept server-side behind a PaymentProvider trait with Xsolla and Mock implementations
Integrated Xsolla checkout as an iframe inside a Tauri 2 desktop game client, polling order status to completion
Wired ESP32 + RC522 NFC firmware through a Rust serial-to-WebSocket bridge into a shared tappad-protocol crate with Rust and JS client SDKs
114 Rust tests, clippy pedantic, no unwrap/expect/panic outside tests, CI running fmt, clippy, and cargo audit
Fantasy Premier League assistant for the terminal: pulls live data from the public FPL API, projects points for every player, and picks the best legal squad, captain and transfers over a 5-gameweek horizon. Python stdlib only, no dependencies, no credentials.
PythonFantasy Premier LeagueMarkdown
Details
Projects points per player per gameweek as shrunk points-per-90 × expected minutes × fixture multiplier × availability, summed over the horizon: a transparent heuristic, not ML
Builds the squad greedily, then improves it by local search with paired swaps, since the budget couples every position; enforces squad quotas, three per club and every legal formation
Writes a weekly Markdown report (XI, captain, bench order, ranked transfers) with --lock, --exclude and --budget overrides and a disk cache that keeps weekly runs off the API
CLI that takes a plain-English dev-tool idea, searches open-source registries for existing implementations, ranks matches with local embeddings, and writes a scoped verdict via LLM.
Multi-retriever RAG with quorum filtering requiring cross-retriever consensus before surfacing evidence. Recalls 19 of 20 answers vs 14 for the baseline.
RustOllamaTokio
Details
Built a multi-retriever ensemble with rank fusion and quorum filtering: 19/20 recall vs 14/20 baseline
Published to crates.io as an installable Rust crate (cargo add quorumrag)
Implemented overlapping chunk processing with 50% stride to prevent boundary-split answers
Added parallel embedding with caching to optimize cold-start performance
Clustered evidence via cosine-similarity centroids so the quorum vote operates on semantic groups rather than raw chunks
State University of New York at Buffalo, BS in Computer Science
Aug 2020 – May 2024 · Buffalo, New York
Awards: Undergraduate Teaching Assistant Award
What colleagues say
Recommendations
“
Put him into a Project Manager/Team Lead role, and I guarantee to you that he will shine.
OK
Oliver Kennedy
Associate Professor, State University of New York at Buffalo
Data Structures — Head Teaching Assistant
“
He not only demonstrated a great technical understanding of the content but was able to explain these concepts in a simple manner to students who were struggling to apply the material.
JH
Jesse Hartloff
Associate Professor of Teaching, State University of New York at Buffalo
Web Applications — Teaching Assistant
“
He was very responsive to requests, professional in all his interactions with students and course staff, and technically competent in all the tools and processes covered in the course.
CA
Carl Alphonce
Professor of Teaching, State University of New York at Buffalo
Software Quality in Practice — Teaching Assistant
“
I was impressed by his strong work ethic, positive attitude, professionalism, and dedication. He proved himself to be an organized, efficient, and hardworking TA.
NA
Nasrin Akhter
Assistant Professor of Teaching, State University of New York at Buffalo
Discrete Structures — Teaching Assistant
“
Riad is one of the best individuals I have ever had the opportunity to work with. His ability to communicate complex concepts to a range of skill levels continually impressed me.
SM
Sean Mackay
Assistant Professor of Computer Science, University of Oklahoma
Introduction to Computer Science — Teaching Assistant
“
I attest to Riad's work ethics, skill, performance, and communication. I do not hesitate to recommend Riad to any employer.
FG
Farshad Ghanei
Associate Teaching Professor, Illinois Institute of Technology
Spent some quality time today at GAMESUMMIT conference. What truly stood was most definitely the networking. For what it takes, I want to thank my teammates Gudrat Abidzada and Shahnaz Orujlu for the lessons learnt and experience gained!
Django
Celery
Gemini
Milvus
React Native
Rust
Tauri
ESP32
Xsolla
WebSocket
Python
Fantasy Premier League
Markdown
Ollama
fastembed
FastAPI
OpenAI
FAISS
Docker
Java
Spring Boot
RabbitMQ
PostgreSQL
Go
UDP
Protobuf
Redis
TypeScript
C
Flask
Node.js
LangGraph
Langfuse
Anthropic API
NVIDIA OpenShell
gRPC
RESTful APIs
GraphQL
WebRTC
Server-Sent Events
LDAP
Apache Kafka
MySQL
SQLite
MongoDB
AWS
Supabase
Kubernetes
GitHub Actions
GitLab CI/CD
Linux
OpenTelemetry
Pytest
Playwright
Jest
Selenium
Postman
Scala
Git
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