Kian Heydari

Senior Developer · Machine Learning & Generative AI · Data Engineering

Toronto, ON, Canada moheydari1997@gmail.com

Senior Developer specializing in machine learning and generative AI applications, backed by solid software and data engineering: ETL pipelines, Azure migration, and CI/CD in production, plus agentic LLM pipelines and small language model distillation in research. Works across Python, SQL Server, Azure, Microsoft Fabric, Databricks, LangGraph, DSPy, and Hugging Face.

Experience

Senior IT Developer

May 2025 – Present

TD Securities · Credit Risk Reporting · Toronto, ON

  • Design, maintain, and optimize ETL pipelines in Python and Microsoft SQL Server that feed credit risk reporting.
  • Migrated legacy ETL applications to Azure, replacing file-watcher triggers with semantic dependencies between jobs: an easier-to-follow flow, fewer failures, and ~50% fewer jobs.
  • Automate build, test, and deployment with GitHub Actions CI/CD, and keep code secure and maintainable with Snyk, Veracode, and SonarQube.
  • Volunteer on the ML Tooling team, focusing on agentic AI and helping colleagues adopt the AI tools being rolled out. My team leads the organization by a wide margin on AI-integration dashboards.
  • Python
  • SQL Server
  • Azure
  • ETL
  • GitHub Actions
  • Snyk
  • Veracode
  • SonarQube
  • Agentic AI

Research Assistant (Part-time)

Jan 2025 – Aug 2025

Carleton University · Supervised by Prof. Ali Arya

  • Researched LLM translation for low-resource Indigenous languages such as Northern Tutchone, which mainstream models have seen little or no data for.
  • Built a training-free agentic translation pipeline and a knowledge distillation pipeline for small, locally run translation models (see Projects).
  • Wrote four literature reviews: LLM capabilities and efficiency; adapting generative models to low-resource languages; retrieving in-context examples without vector indexes; and grammar induction.
  • Compared mT5, mBART, XLM-R adaptations (XLM-SWCM, XLM-V), NLLB, BLOOMZ, ByT5, language-specific (PhoBERT, AfriBERTa), and specialized models (FuxiMT, DeltaLM).
  • LLMs
  • Low-resource NLP
  • Knowledge distillation
  • Agentic AI

Analytics Engineer

Feb 2025 – Apr 2025

Revolution Data Platforms

  • Developed a real-time customer service call management system using Python, FastAPI, and WebSockets, with end-to-end voice data pipelines.
  • Prototyped voice memo transcription with structured data extraction and automated task management based on content severity.
  • Optimized multi-class text classification through prompt engineering and k-fold validation.
  • Improved data quality through web scraping, transformation, and preprocessing in Python.
  • Python
  • FastAPI
  • WebSockets
  • Speech-to-text
  • Prompt engineering

Software Engineer

Jan 2023 – Aug 2024

Paphus Solutions

  • Developed chatbot APIs across multiple platforms using Python and RESTful services.
  • Optimized deep learning models for custom question answering.
  • Integrated Python analytics pipelines with cloud services through optimized ETL workflows.
  • Migrated a Unity-based Android application to WebGL with asynchronous connection management.
  • Python
  • Chatbots
  • Deep learning
  • REST APIs
  • ETL
  • Cloud

Course Instructor

Sep 2022 – Dec 2022

Carleton University

  • Taught Python workshops on data manipulation, pandas, and ETL concepts.
  • Guided students through ER modeling and SQL, emphasizing data integrity and query optimization.

Graduate Research Assistant

Jan 2021 – Nov 2022

Carleton University

  • Built a Python data generation and transformation pipeline for deep learning research.
  • Designed data preprocessing workflows and custom metrics for model evaluation.
  • Python
  • Deep learning
  • Data pipelines

Undergraduate Research Assistant

Feb 2018 – Dec 2020

Amirkabir University of Technology

  • Developed a Python anomaly detection system for time-series data, with feature extraction.
  • Created simulation frameworks to generate and validate synthetic training data.
  • Python
  • Time series
  • Anomaly detection

Education

Master of Science, Computer Science

Jan 2021 – Nov 2022

Carleton University · Specialization in Data Science

Bachelor of Science, Computer Engineering

Sep 2015 – Dec 2020

Amirkabir University of Technology

Projects

Multi-Agent Translation System

Source

Training-free, few-shot translation into languages the base LLM was not trained on, inspired by “Hire a Linguist!”. Parallel agents pull relevant dictionary entries, grammar rules, and examples; a translator agent and an LLM judge run a self-correction loop. Adds a map-reduce mode for large documents and a memory layer that learns from judge feedback.

  • LangGraph
  • DSPy
  • Instructor
  • LiteLLM
  • Streamlit

Small Language Model Distillation for Translation

Teacher LLMs (Mistral, Gemma 2) enrich a small English–Northern Tutchone parallel corpus with paraphrases, context, and longer sequences; multilingual students (mT5, M2M100, mBART-50) are fine-tuned fully or with LoRA in both directions, with BLEU-based early stopping, grid search, and MLflow tracking.

  • PyTorch
  • Hugging Face
  • LoRA
  • MLflow
  • Ollama

Fine-Tuning and Local RAG for LLMs

Lightweight RAG pipeline in Python for domain-specific data.

  • Python
  • RAG
  • LLMs

Custom Information Retrieval System

Search engine from scratch in Python, with custom indexing.

  • Python
  • pandas
  • Information retrieval

NLP-Driven Sentiment Analysis

pandas/NumPy pipeline reaching 93.61% classification accuracy.

  • Python
  • NumPy
  • NLP

Skills

ML & Generative AI

  • LangGraph
  • DSPy
  • Instructor
  • LiteLLM
  • Hugging Face Transformers
  • PyTorch
  • PEFT / LoRA
  • Knowledge distillation
  • RAG
  • Prompt engineering
  • MLflow
  • scikit-learn
  • pandas
  • NumPy

Data Engineering

  • ETL design
  • SQL Server
  • Microsoft Fabric
  • Databricks
  • PostgreSQL
  • MySQL
  • NoSQL

Cloud & DevOps

  • Azure
  • AWS
  • GitHub Actions
  • Docker
  • Git
  • Linux
  • Snyk
  • Veracode
  • SonarQube

Backend & APIs

  • FastAPI
  • Flask
  • Django
  • ASP.NET
  • REST
  • WebSockets
  • Streamlit

Programming

  • Python
  • SQL
  • C# (.NET)
  • Java
  • JavaScript / TypeScript

Certifications & Languages