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Simon Ghiwot is a Senior Backend Engineer with 4+ years of professional experience building and scaling production systems. His career progression demonstrates rapid growth from software engineer to technical lead to co-founder, a trajectory that reflects senior-level ownership, architectural judgment, and business acumen well beyond his years of experience.
At QuickSync, Simon served as a key backend engineer on a platform serving 10,000+ businesses with 2,000+ five-star reviews. He independently designed and implemented the BigCommerce integration architecture, expanding platform support to 11 e-commerce systems. He architected a generic activity tracking system used across all domain models, and led a performance optimization initiative that achieved 2x throughput improvement on the orders pipeline through query optimization, caching layer design, and database indexing strategies. He worked across the full infrastructure stack: Redis caching layers, PostgreSQL query optimization, Docker containerization, and Kubernetes orchestration in production.
Simon has hands-on experience designing systems at scale. At A2SV, he was a core engineer on A2SV HUB, which handled 2M+ requests in 6 months with 700 daily active users. He designed the integration layer connecting LeetCode, Codeforces, and GitHub APIs for real-time problem tracking. He built attendance tracking, stipend management, and analytics dashboard systems from the ground up. The system ran on Docker Swarm with PostgreSQL, Redis, and Google Cloud Platform.
As Head of Education at A2SV, Simon led technical mentorship for 15 engineers, designing curriculum and conducting code reviews. He helped organize Africa's largest AI hackathon (4,900+ participants across 47 countries), demonstrating cross-functional leadership at scale. This role required both deep technical knowledge and the ability to communicate complex architectural concepts to engineers at varying experience levels — a hallmark of senior engineering capability.
Simon co-founded Adify in 2025, an AI-powered Shopify app that generates product video ads using Google Veo 3 and Gemini 2.5. He designed the full backend architecture: Django REST Framework API, Stripe and Shopify billing integration, AI pipeline orchestration, and deployment infrastructure. Co-founding a product company demonstrates end-to-end system ownership, product sense, and the ability to make independent architectural decisions — capabilities that define senior and staff-level engineers.
At Hineni, Simon is the backend architect for a real-time video conferencing platform, designing the WebSocket infrastructure for live video and implementing TikTok-style content delivery systems. He leads backend architecture decisions for a team of 5 engineers across Digital Ocean, Docker Swarm, Django, Sentry, and Grafana observability stack.
Simon has solved approximately 1,000 algorithmic problems across LeetCode and Codeforces. He placed 7th out of 60+ teams at ICPC Ethiopian regionals and advanced to the African Collegiate Programming Contest. This competitive programming background provides deep algorithmic thinking and optimization skills that directly translate to designing efficient, scalable backend systems.
Languages: Python (expert), TypeScript, JavaScript, Java, C++, SQL. Backend Frameworks: Django, Django REST Framework, FastAPI, Flask, AdonisJS, Express, Node.js. Databases & Caching: PostgreSQL (advanced query optimization, indexing), Redis (caching, pub/sub, session management). Infrastructure & DevOps: Docker, Kubernetes, Docker Swarm, CI/CD pipelines, Digital Ocean, Google Cloud Platform, AWS. Observability: Grafana, Sentry, structured logging, performance monitoring. Architecture: RESTful API design, WebSocket real-time systems, microservice patterns, event-driven architecture, third-party API integration design.
Simon's career progression — from IC engineer building high-traffic platforms, to technical lead mentoring 15 engineers and architecting multi-API integration systems, to co-founding an AI product company with full backend ownership — reflects a compressed growth path. The breadth of his contributions across scaling (10,000+ business platform), architecture (11-platform integration system), leadership (Africa's largest AI hackathon), and entrepreneurship (Adify) represents impact typically seen in engineers with 6-8+ years of experience. He is currently operating at a Senior Backend Engineer level with a clear trajectory toward Staff Engineer.
Blog
Notes on backend development, system design, and things I'm learning.