Bereket Tilahun Shimekit

Software Engineer, ML Researcher & Problem Solver

Building intelligent systems and scalable solutions. Passionate about machine learning, full-stack development, and creating meaningful impact through technology.

Let's Connect View Work

GitHub LinkedIn Email

Scroll

ABOUT

Who · what · where

CURRENT_STATE

I'm a Master's student in Computer Science and Graduate Research Assistant at Fordham University (NYC), focused on applied NLP and LLM systems. Before that I led my class at Addis Ababa Institute of Technology (AAIT) as valedictorian and built production software at Ethiopian tech companies.

The thread across everything I build: AI that meets the user where they are — a chatbot in Amharic for farmers without typing skills, a mock interviewer that speaks back to you out loud, a VS Code extension that lets you ask an unfamiliar codebase “what does this do?” in plain English.

4.0

GPA · MS @ Fordham

Years shipping production code

24K+

Amharic QA dataset rows

Production projects shipped

Recognition

Gold Medal · Valedictorian

AAIT Software Engineering, 2024

2nd Place · ICPC

Ethiopia Regional, 2023

Best Project of Department

Featured on Ethiopian National TV

WHAT_I_BUILD

Applied LLMs

Fine-tuning, prompting, retrieval. Shipped LoRA on Amharic LLaMA and a Gemini-powered interview coach.

Full-stack production

React/Next/Angular on the front, FastAPI/Spring Boot/Node on the back. CRMs, dental platforms, dev tools.

Dev tooling

VS Code extensions, codebase Q&A, dependency visualization. Tooling that makes other engineers faster.

RIGHT_NOW

Open to Summer 2026 ML/SWE internships and full-time roles starting Spring 2027. I'm looking for teams where engineering and research aren't separate departments — places building something they'd use themselves. Strong bias for shipping over slides.

EXPERIENCE

SCROLL TO NAVIGATE TIMELINE

[01]

Graduate Research Assistant

Fordham University

New York, NY

Aug 2025 – Present

Conduct research in NLP and machine learning with focus on transformer-based models
Fine-tuned large language models for reasoning accuracy and robustness

[02]

Staff Engineer

Molar Inc.

Remote — New York, USA

Feb 2025 – Aug 2025

Led development of core production features for a dental technology platform used by clinics
Designed scalable backend services and responsive frontend components

[03]

Software Engineer

Quality Test Ltd.

Remote — Tel Aviv, Israel

Apr 2024 – Aug 2025

Developed and maintained a CRM system for a nationally accredited testing company
Implemented approval management workflows using Angular and Spring Boot

[04]

Assistant Lecturer

Addis Ababa University

Addis Ababa, Ethiopia

Feb 2025 – Jun 2025

Taught Data Structures and Algorithms and led problem-solving sessions

[05]

Full Stack Developer

Kifiya Financial Technology

Addis Ababa, Ethiopia

Sep 2024 – May 2025

Built and maintained end-to-end fintech applications
Implemented secure and efficient data pipelines for transaction processing

[06]

Head of Remote Education

A2SV

Remote

Feb 2023 – Apr 2024

Led the design and delivery of advanced DSA curriculum
Mentored students through code reviews and technical interview preparation

PROJECTS

What I've actually built · click a category to filter

LIVEAI Product

Apr 2026 – May 2026

Mock-with-AI

AI Mock Interview Platform · Voice + Code

Solo-built mock technical interview platform that pushes back like a real engineer. Candidates talk through their approach in text or voice, write code in Monaco, run against hidden tests in a sandbox, and get a structured 4-axis scorecard.

Voice mode via Web Speech API — STT + TTS, no API keys for users
Editor-aware Gemini 2.5 interviewer that comments on candidate code as they type
Sandboxed code execution against hidden test cases via Judge0
Structured 1–5 scoring across correctness, code quality, communication, problem-solving

React 19TypeScriptFastAPIGemini 2.5MonacoJudge0Web Speech API

Live demo GitHub

[01]

PUBLISHEDDev Tooling

Feb 2026 – Mar 2026

Repo Why

VS Code Extension · Codebase Q&A + Dependency Graph

A VS Code extension that lets engineers ask any codebase questions in plain English and answers with citations from the actual files. Includes an interactive dependency graph showing how every file connects.

Interactive force-directed dependency graph — click any file to jump
Plain-English codebase Q&A with streaming responses and cited source files
Bring-your-own-key (Groq free tier) — keys live in the OS keychain, zero telemetry
Multi-language: TypeScript, Python, Go, Rust, Java, C/C++, and more

TypeScriptVS Code APIGroqD3Streaming LLMAST parsing

Marketplace GitHub

[02]

RESEARCHML Research

Sep 2023 – Jun 2024

Amharic Agricultural Chatbot

Low-Resource NLP · LoRA fine-tuning on LLaMA

Senior thesis. Built an Amharic-language agricultural assistant for smallholder farmers. Fine-tuned EthioNLP's Amharic LLaMA with LoRA on a custom 24K+ QA dataset, benchmarked against LSTM and transformer baselines.

Curated and cleaned a 24K+ row Amharic QA dataset on crop, soil, and pest topics
LoRA fine-tuning of Amharic LLaMA — parameter-efficient on a single GPU
Best Project of the Department · featured on Ethiopian National TV

PyTorchTransformersLoRANLPLSTM

[03]

RESEARCHML Research

Aug 2025 – Dec 2025

NYC Housing Code Violations

Unsupervised ML · Building Risk Patterns

Graduate research at Fordham. Used unsupervised learning on NYC Housing Maintenance Code Violation data to surface latent risk profiles across the city's building stock and inform inspection prioritization.

Cleaned and engineered features from ~1M raw NYC HPD violation records
Compared K-Means, DBSCAN, hierarchical clustering on building-level risk profiles
Surfaced previously unflagged high-risk clusters in outer-borough neighborhoods

Pythonscikit-learnPandasClustering

[04]

PRODUCTIONFull-Stack

Apr 2024 – Aug 2025

CRM System · Quality Test Ltd.

Enterprise Web App · Approval Workflows

Designed and built the CRM running operations at Quality Test Ltd., a nationally accredited construction-testing firm in Ethiopia. Multi-department approvals, audit trails, customer lifecycle management.

RESTful Spring Boot backend with role-based access across 5 departments
Angular frontend with form-heavy approval flows and PDF report generation
PostgreSQL data model with audit logging on every status transition

AngularSpring BootJavaPostgreSQLREST

[05]

PRODUCTIONFull-Stack

Feb 2025 – Aug 2025

Dental Technology Platform

Production Web Platform · Clinic Operations

Led core feature development for a dental tech platform serving multiple clinics. Owned both the backend service architecture and the responsive frontend modules clinicians use day-to-day.