# NIK AFIQ Tokyo, Japan nik@nik4nao.com | github.com/nikafiq | nik4nao.com --- ## PROFESSIONAL SUMMARY Backend engineer with 3 years of professional experience designing and operating distributed, high-throughput systems on GCP and AWS. Core expertise in Go and Python, with hands-on production experience in event-driven microservices, Kafka-based pipelines, Kubernetes, and cloud-native data infrastructure. Comfortable operating systems at hundreds of TPS with reliability and zero-downtime migration constraints. Trilingual (English, Japanese N1, Malay) — routinely bridges Japanese and overseas engineering teams. Actively integrates AI tooling (GitHub Copilot, Gemini, Claude) into daily coding, review, and documentation workflows. --- ## WORK EXPERIENCE ### 株式会社ホープス (Hopes Co., Ltd.) — Tokyo **Backend Engineer** | Aug 2025 – Present Designing and operating a distributed consent management pipeline on GCP/GKE connecting a high-traffic notification delivery system to a downstream fulfillment API. - Proposed and led adoption of a Kafka-based queuing architecture to handle concurrent notification fan-out, identifying it as the correct solution for account_id ordering under 20–40 TPS load - Designed the request coalescing strategy using singleflight to suppress duplicate in-flight downstream calls per account_id - Architected the full event-driven pipeline: GKE + Managed Kafka (8 partitions, keyed by account_id) + Cloud Spanner, with a 200 TPS global cap and 10-second downstream timeout budget - Designed graceful shutdown sequence for the consumer service, ensuring in-flight requests complete cleanly before pod termination - Designed reliable offset commit ordering: offsets committed only after durable Spanner write, ensuring at-least-once delivery with no data loss on crash - Implemented retry cronjob requeuing up to 5 failed Spanner rows back to Kafka every 5 minutes with configurable backoff - Designed a zero-downtime interleaved index migration on a Cloud Spanner accounts table under 400 TPS sustained read traffic - Designed OpenTelemetry integration with Datadog, defining trace, span, and metrics strategy across services; integrated with Wiz for unified observability and security posture - Built CI pipeline with semantic version tag enforcement — prevents image tag overwrites while allowing latest to update freely; scoped Workload Identity permissions to read-only minimum - Led performance testing with Locust (40 TPS steady / 120 TPS burst); applied results to right-size GKE CPU/memory configs - Led TDD adoption for the team and authored development guidelines covering milestone structure, ticket definition-of-done standards, and code review expectations - Identified a 1-month deadline slip during mob programming, escalated to leadership, facilitated full task breakdown and schedule re-baseline across the team - Stepped up as informal tech lead during a leadership gap — created progression guidelines, maintained ticket quality, and kept formal leadership informed of all decisions and scope - Tasked with onboarding and upskilling Phase 2 application team members to raise codebase quality ahead of next release ### 株式会社ニッポンダイナミックシステムズ — Tokyo **Full Stack Engineer, IT Solutions — Pharma Market Team** | Apr 2023 – Jul 2025 - Built a scalable analytical DWH on Amazon Aurora (RDS) for a pharmaceutical client, integrating Salesforce and multiple external data sources via daily/weekly ETL batch pipelines using ECS/Fargate and Lambda; designed for HA with Multi-AZ failover - Constructed a SaaS data lake using AWS CDK + Glue + TypeScript/Python, fully automating ETL ingestion across heterogeneous data sources - Developed an internal AI application using AWS Bedrock (Claude Sonnet) + React, implementing RAG-based document retrieval and SES-based user matching in a small cross-functional team - Built a license authentication service (Node.js + Docker + Azure Web Apps + ADB2C), owning requirements definition, auth logic design, and client-facing communication - Designed and automated monthly maintenance operations: AMI image updates, security patching, automated regression testing, and blue/green deployments via AWS CodePipeline and Azure Pipelines - Conducted Docker image vulnerability scanning as part of CI/CD pipeline; managed VPC, WAF, and Security Group configurations - Mentored junior engineers on cloud architecture patterns; functioned as bilingual (EN/JA) liaison between domestic and overseas engineering teams --- ## SKILLS **Languages:** Go, Python, TypeScript/JavaScript **Frameworks:** Gin, Flask, Next.js, Node.js **Cloud — AWS:** ECS/Fargate, Lambda, Aurora/RDS, DynamoDB, Glue, CDK, CodePipeline, Bedrock, Secrets Manager **Cloud — GCP:** GKE, Cloud Spanner, Managed Kafka, BigQuery, Cloud Trace **Cloud — Azure:** Web Apps, ADB2C, Azure Pipelines **Data:** MySQL, Aurora, PostgreSQL, DynamoDB, Cloud Spanner, Kafka, Redis **DevOps:** Docker, Kubernetes, ArgoCD, CI/CD, IaC (AWS CDK, Ansible) **Observability:** OpenTelemetry, Datadog, distributed tracing, ELK stack, Kibana **AI Tooling:** GitHub Copilot (daily coding + code review), Gemini (documentation + research), Claude (architecture reasoning + coding), AWS Bedrock RAG (production) **Security:** VPC, WAF, Security Groups, Secrets Manager, Workload Identity, Wiz, Docker vulnerability scanning **Other:** Homelab (k3s, self-hosted services, Ansible/IaC), personal dev blog at nik4nao.com --- ## CERTIFICATIONS | Certification | Issued | |---|---| | AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA) | Oct 2024 | | AWS Certified Developer – Associate (DVA) | Dec 2024 | | AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner (CLF) | Apr 2024 | | 基本情報技術者試験 (FE) — IPA Fundamental IT Engineer | Aug 2024 | | JLPT N1 — Japanese Language Proficiency | Dec 2022 | *In progress: AWS Solutions Architect – Professional (SAP), Applied Information Technology Engineer (AP)* --- ## EDUCATION **Tokai University** — Bachelor of Engineering Major: Electrical and Electronic Engineering Minor: Information Technology Graduated: March 2023 *During a COVID-related leave of absence (2020–2021), independently studied programming and cloud architecture; resumed with an added IT minor upon return.* --- ## ADDITIONAL - **Languages:** English (business), Japanese (JLPT N1), Malay (native) - **Homelab:** Self-hosted k3s cluster, Gitea, Jellyfin, Cloudflare Tunnel, Ansible-based IaC on Minisforum UM790 Pro - **Dev blog / personal site:** nik4nao.com - **Self-hosted Git:** gitea.nik4nao.com (mirrored to github.com/nikafiq)