AI & Software Engineer · Baku, Azerbaijan

Riad Mukhtarov

develops software and AI systems in Rust and Python, with a focus on distributed systems and complex infrastructure. Before that, he taught computer science at State University of New York at Buffalo. He likes complicated challenges and clean abstractions.

→whoami
AI Engineer @ ABB · International Bank of Azerbaijan
Head of IT @ European Youth Parliament AZ
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1000+ students taught·5+ teams led·4+ yrs shipping·Colophon
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Academic background

Education

State University of New York at Buffalo, BS in Computer Science

Aug 2020 – May 2024 · Buffalo, New York
  • Awards: Undergraduate Teaching Assistant Award, Multiple Dean's List Honors
Work history

Experience

Apr 2026 – Present
Artificial Intelligence Engineer
ABB - International Bank of Azerbaijan
Baku, Azerbaijan
  • Building an LLM agent platform on LangGraph, LangChain and FastAPI with an OpenAI-compatible streaming API
  • Engineering a kernel-enforced agent sandbox: user namespaces, pivot_root, cgroup v2 and seccomp-BPF filtering
  • Adding per-user capacity gating, daily token budgets, Postgres-checkpointed threads and HMAC-signed downloads
  • Building a weekly AI briefing pipeline: crawl, LLM search, story clustering, slide deck and Gemini podcast
Feb 2026 – Present
Head of IT
European Youth Parliament Azerbaijan
Baku, Azerbaijan
  • Coordinating the website renewal, internal platform improvements, and new technology rollouts
  • Leading the development team on the public website and member-facing tools
  • Owning the organization’s domains, hosting, email and access management
Oct 2024 – Nov 2024
Information and Communication Technology (ICT) Assistant
COP29 United Nations Climate Change Conference
Baku, Azerbaijan
  • Ensured 99.9% uptime for IT infrastructure supporting 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 core data structures and algorithms in Scala and Java to ~1000 students
  • Managed 20 TAs and 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
EZ Pro Billing and Collection Inc.
New York, NY
  • Built backend systems using Python and MongoDB with ADA-compliant frontend components
  • Developed authentication and task-based point allocation system
  • Optimized WebSockets, cutting server load 90% and enabling instant sync
Selected work

Projects

GitHub

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

GitHubcrates.iodocs.rs

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.

RustTokioOllamaratatuifastembed

– stars on GitHub · – downloads on crates.io

Details
  • Built concurrent source adapters for 11 registries, from crates.io, npm and PyPI to Docker Hub and Hacker News
  • Designed integrity-scoped verdict system that never asserts absence, only reports what was found in sources checked
  • Added interactive ratatui TUI with detail view, browser open, and structured JSON output for CI pipelines

GitHubcrates.iodocs.rs

Multi-retriever RAG with quorum filtering requiring cross-retriever consensus before surfacing evidence. Achieved 95% recall vs 70% baseline.

RustOllamaTokio
Details
  • Published to crates.io as an installable Rust crate (cargo add quorumrag)
  • Built multi-retriever ensemble with Reciprocal Rank Fusion scoring and quorum filtering
  • 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

GitHub

RAG chatbot answering questions exclusively from ABB Bank's public content with multilingual support and strict context-only guardrails.

PythonFastAPIOpenAIFAISSDocker
Details
  • Built a two-service RAG pipeline (gateway + QA) that scrapes, chunks, and indexes bank pages via FAISS
  • Implemented multilingual support across Azerbaijani, English, and Russian with prompt injection blocking
  • Applied distance-gated out-of-scope detection to prevent hallucination, returning 'Bunu bilmirəm' for off-topic queries
  • Added SQLite observability and Chart.js query analytics dashboard for monitoring chatbot usage

GitHub

End-to-end transaction monitoring pipeline with event-driven scoring, async processing via RabbitMQ, and idempotent data handling.

JavaSpring BootRabbitMQPostgreSQLDocker
Details
  • Designed event-driven architecture for scoring, notifications, and reporting
  • Built async processing with RabbitMQ and safe reprocessing
  • Implemented per-service databases with Liquibase migrations and environment-based configuration
  • Deployed to AWS EC2 with Docker Compose, Linux networking, and public endpoints

A cluster that keeps serving through leader crashes and network partitions: up to ⌊n/2⌋ nodes can fail without a committed entry being lost.

GoUDPProtobuf
Details
  • Implemented leader election with randomized timeouts and term-based logical clocks to prevent split votes
  • Built log replication via AppendEntries RPC with consistency checks and quorum-based commitment
  • Handled node failures and network partitions while tolerating up to ⌊n/2⌋ server failures
  • Enforced safety guarantees ensuring elected leaders always contain all previously committed entries
  • Designed custom RPC framework over UDP with Protobuf serialization, retransmission, and message deduplication
L leader F F F term 3
Leader replicates log entries via AppendEntries RPC

Any key is found in O(log n) hops and stays findable as nodes join and leave, with every value held on the k closest peers.

GoTCPProtobuf
Details
  • Implemented XOR-based distance metric with k-bucket routing tables for peer organization
  • Built iterative node lookup with α concurrent queries refining toward target keys in O(log n) hops
  • Designed join and bootstrap protocol for routing table population from seed nodes
  • Added key-value republishing and redundant storage across k closest nodes for fault tolerance
S source N d = 8 N d = 3 T d = 0
Iterative FIND_NODE lookup converges via XOR distance

Every entry expires on its TTL and dangling cross-layer references are collected, so reads stop returning stale data at no cost to the hot path.

RustTokioRedis
Details
  • Replaced a monolithic cache with two layers: key-subkey to id mapping and id to value storage
  • Applied TTL lifecycle control to expire stale entries predictably
  • Implemented garbage collection to remove expired entries and dangling cross-layer references
  • Preserved low-latency access while improving consistency in distributed workloads
KEY → ID user:1 → id:7 sess:3 → id:12 tok:5 → id:9 ttl ID → VALUE id:7 → val id:12 → val id:9 → expired gc sweep
Two-layer TTL-aware cache with garbage collection
Toolbox

Technical Skills

Programming Languages

RustPythonTypeScriptGoC

Backend & Runtimes

AxumActix-webTokioratatuiFastAPIFlaskNode.js

AI, ML & Agentic Systems

LangGraphLangChainMCPDeep AgentsLangfuseOpenAI APIAnthropic APIGeminiFAISSOllamaLangSmithNVIDIA OpenShell

Protocols, APIs & Messaging

gRPCRESTful APIsGraphQLWebSocketsWebRTCServer-Sent EventsLDAPApache KafkaRabbitMQ

Databases & Persistence

PostgreSQLMySQLSQLiteMongoDBRedispgvector

Cloud, Infrastructure & DevOps

AWSSupabaseDockerKubernetesGitHub ActionsGitLab CI/CDLinuxLinux namespaces & cgroupsseccomp-BPFOpenTelemetry

Testing & Quality Assurance

PytestrstestPlaywrightJestSeleniumPostman
Teaching experience

Teaching

Data Structures

tools
JavaScalaGit
topics
Algorithms & ComplexityData Structures

Web Applications

tools
PythonFlaskFastAPIREST APIs
topics
HTTP(S)Back-End Web Development

Software Quality in Practice

tools
GitLinuxTrello
topics
GDBQA EngineeringCode CoverageMake

Discrete Structures

topics
LogicProofsDiscrete Mathematics

Introduction to Computer Science

tools
Python

Computer Organization

topics
MIPS AssemblySystemVerilogComputer Architecture
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
Computer Organization — Teaching Assistant