Kai Hirota

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.

• Go
• TypeScript
• PostgreSQL
• Redis
• AWS
• Terraform
• Docker
• Kubernetes

• Monolith decomposition. 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.
• Webhook platform. Built customer-facing webhook delivery with cross-team collaboration; payloads matched API response schemas with SDK deserialization and signature validation, plus self-service delivery logs and success-rate monitoring.
• Asset migration. Designed a migration service for ~10M digital assets with a combined market cap of $20–30M between two storage systems with incompatible schemas.

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.

• Dart
• Flutter
• Python
• FastAPI
• PostgreSQL
• Azure
• Docker
• GitHub Actions

• Flutter app features. Developed full-stack features for a cross-platform Flutter application used for assignment submission and grading.
• CI/CD migration. Led migration from single-VM deployment to containerized microservices on GitHub Actions.
• REST API layer. Designed and shipped a FastAPI layer abstracting database CRUD operations.
• Client-side caching. Improved page load performance with an in-memory key-value cache on the client.

Feb 2022 - Jun 2022

• Unreal Engine 5
• C++
• AWS Kinesis
• Redis Pub/Sub
• WebSockets

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

Aug 2019 - Jan 2020

• SQL
• Apache Superset
• Jupyter Notebook
• Pandas
• GeoPandas
• QGIS
• Mapbox
• Python

• Tokyo 2020 strategy. Partnered with executives to deliver data-driven insights informing business strategy for the Tokyo 2020 Olympics, translating statistical analyses into actionable recommendations for non-technical stakeholders.
• Kyoto siting analysis. 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.

Oct 2018 - Apr 2019

Fracta uses machine learning to predict failure of water pipes.

• SQL
• Jupyter Notebook
• Pandas
• GeoPandas
• QGIS
• Mapbox
• Python
• OSGeo
• Shapely

• Geospatial preprocessing. Built an automated 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.
• Vector graph reconstruction. Developed a vector data cleaning system that reconstructs connected network graphs from noisy pipe geometry — inferring node positions and connectivity from raw edge coordinates without known topology.

Mar 2021 - Aug 2022

• ENGN6528 Computer Vision
• COMP8600 Statistical Machine Learning
• COMP6490 Natural Language Processing
• COMP6300 Operating System
• COMP6442 Software Construction
• COMP6331 Computer Networks

Mar 2020 - Jan 2021

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

Oct 2016 - Oct 2018

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