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)

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