Kai Hirota

Software Engineer @ Stake ยท Co-Founder @ Koi Labs

kai@koilabs.io

Experience ๐Ÿ–‹๏ธ

Immutable

Aug 2022 - Jan 2025

Immutable is a global leader in gaming on a mission to bring digital ownership to every player by making it safe and easy to build great web3 games.

  • Stack: Go, TypeScript, PostgreSQL, Redis, AWS (EventBridge, SQS, Lambda, SNS, S3), Terraform, Docker, Kubernetes
  • Drove core workstreams in a year-long monolith-to-microservices decomposition, designing zero-downtime rollout sequencing and idempotent consumer patterns to safely shift from exactly-once to at-least-once event delivery for high-throughput financial transactions.
  • Built customer-facing webhook platform with cross-team collaboration; event payloads matched API response schemas with SDK deserialization and signature validation, plus self-service delivery logs and success rate monitoring.
  • Designed migration service for ~10M digital assets with a combined market cap of $20-30M between two storage systems with incompatible schemas.

Software Innovation Institute, Australian National University

Software Engineer (Casual Worker)

Canberra ACT, Australia

Feb 2022 - Aug 2022

The Software Innovation Institute is an ANU flagship initiative comprising an expert cross-disciplinary team of researchers, research engineers, software engineers and students to solve complex client problems at scale. The Institute undertakes software development projects requiring the development and linking of new research techniques to build solutions for clients.

  • Stack: Dart, Flutter, Python, Azure, Docker, GitHub Actions, PostgreSQL, FastAPI
  • Developed full-stack features for cross-platform Flutter application for assignment submission and grading.
  • Led CI/CD migration from single VM deployment to containerized microservices using GitHub Actions.
  • Designed and shipped REST API layer abstracting database CRUD operations using FastAPI.
  • Improved page load performance through client-side caching with in-memory key-value store.

Mojexa

Software Engineer Intern

Canberra, Australia

Feb 2022 - Jun 2022

  • Built real-time backend ingesting IoT sensor data into Kinesis, fanning out via Redis PubSub to WebSocket servers that push location updates to subscribed Unreal Engine clients.
  • Developed UE5 C++ plugin to bind in-game actors to real-world entities, with coordinate transforms for GPS-to-game mapping and support for both live tracking and historical replay.

Airbnb

Aug 2019 - Jan 2020

  • Partnered with executives to deliver data-driven insights informing business strategy for Tokyo 2020 Olympics, translating statistical analyses into actionable recommendations for non-technical stakeholders.
  • Determined optimal check-in station locations in Kyoto using geospatial analysis and Poisson-modeled arrival patterns, minimizing cost while satisfying legal distance requirements and peak capacity constraints.

Fracta.ai

Data Engineer

Redwood City, CA

Oct 2018 - Apr 2019

Fracta uses machine learning to predict failure of water pipes.

  • Built automated data preprocessing pipeline ingesting heterogeneous vector and raster inputs (pipe networks, soil, traffic, elevation) and transforming them into features for ML prediction of water pipe failure likelihood.
  • Developed vector data cleaning system that reconstructs connected network graphs from noisy pipe geometry data โ€” inferring node positions and connectivity from raw edge coordinates without known topology.

Education ๐ŸŽ“

Australian National University

Master of Computing (Machine Learning)

Canberra ACT, Australia

Mar 2021 - Aug 2022

  • ENGN6528 Computer Vision
  • COMP8600 Statistical Machine Learning
  • COMP6490 Natural Language Processing
  • COMP6300 Computer Organisation & Program Execution (Assembly)
  • COMP6442 Software Construction
  • COMP6331 Computer Networks

University of Sydney

Master of IT (Transferred without completion) (Data Science)

Sydney, Australia

Mar 2020 - Jan 2021

  • Probability and Statistics
  • Algorithms
  • Database Management Systems
  • Software Engineering in Java
  • Machine Learning
  • Information Theory and Self-Organization
  • Advanced Data Models

Santa Clara University

Bachelor of Commerce (Information Systems & Analytics)

Santa Clara, California, USA

Oct 2016 - Oct 2018

  • Introduction to Programming in C
  • Systems Programming
  • Operation Management
  • Strategic Analysis Capstone
  • Statistics & Data Analysis