Amittai Siavava — timeline

Fullstack engineering intern at Copia, Nairobi.

Built order tracking for SMS and mobile-money e-commerce with two million customers.

Teaching assistant for Systems (CS 50).

Students write their own data structures in C, then use them to build a search engine with a crawler, an indexer, and a querier. The term ends with a team project, where groups share one Git repository and work with git-flow to build a multi-user CLI game.

Software engineering intern at Meta, Menlo Park.

Worked on the Ads Serving Reliability team. Prototyped a closed-loop ML pipeline from data stores to training and inference and back to the apps, as iOS 14.5 privacy rules cut ad signal, and built a CLI to monitor and throttle its data throughput.

Also: Y Combinator Startup School.

Teaching assistant for Data Structures & Algorithms (CS 10).

This is the second intro course, taught in Java. It covers object-oriented design and the standard data structures, like lists, trees, hash maps, and graphs. The problem sets use them for things like webcam image processing, Huffman compression, and part-of-speech tagging.

Researcher at the Reality & Robotics Lab, with Alberto Quattrini Li.

Worked on deep learning and deep reinforcement learning for waterline detection on autonomous boats.

Teaching assistant for Database Systems (CS 61).

The class covers relational databases, SQL, and transactions, then NoSQL systems like MongoDB. When I took it, I built a MySQL system for managing a journal's submissions and a blog server on MongoDB.

Teaching assistant for Artificial Intelligence (CS 76).

It's an introduction to AI in Python, covering search, game playing, constraint satisfaction, logic, and probabilistic reasoning. Each topic comes with a programming assignment, like a chess bot that uses minimax with alpha-beta pruning.

Teaching assistant for Systems (CS 50).

Students write their own data structures in C, then use them to build a search engine with a crawler, an indexer, and a querier. The term ends with a team project, where groups share one Git repository and work with git-flow to build a multi-user CLI game.

Teaching assistant for Fullstack Web Development (CS 52).

Students start with HTML and CSS, then build React front ends and the APIs behind them, and deploy what they make. The last few weeks go to a group project where each team designs and builds its own app.

Product engineer at Meta, Menlo Park.

Joined the Messaging APIs team, building the messaging APIs businesses use to reach their customers on Messenger and Instagram.

Focus areas:

• Back end (Hack/PHP)
• Web (React, TypeScript)
• iOS (Objective-C/C++, Swift)
• Observability
• On-call rotation

Mentored a summer intern, who shipped multiple features in Instagram Direct and Facebook Messenger.

Mentored a new teammate across multiple projects in Messenger and Instagram messaging.