Kidist Wosenyeleh
Software engineer & creative technologist
Minneapolis-St. Paul, MN | 651-216-7184 | kidistmakeda@gmail.comxidist.xyz | github.com/xidist | LinkedIn
Software engineer with experience building Azure AI services, automating deployments for industrial systems, and teaching computer graphics. I also build interactive audio and visual tools. Available for contract projects.
Professional engineering & teaching
Renovo Automation | DevOps Engineer | Aug–Oct 2026
- Developed a reusable Rust tool for single-server deployment automation in about two weeks.
- Developed a hospital-infrastructure market-expansion proposal with executive leadership.
- Worked with Linux, CI/CD, Kubernetes tooling, and observability for industrial automation; explored failover and high availability.
Microsoft · Azure OpenAI / AI Platform | Software Engineer | Aug 2023–May 2025
- Developed and maintained C#/.NET REST APIs for production AI inference and model serving on Azure.
- Served as primary on-call engineer for Azure AI microservices during week-long, 24/7 rotations every six weeks, achieving incident mitigation in under two hours.
- Investigated distributed-systems issues using telemetry and logs; contributed to a backward-compatible v2 controller migration.
Microsoft | Software Engineering Intern | Summers 2021 & 2022
- Contributed to MLflow feature store and data lineage integrations using gRPC, Protocol Buffers, and Apache Arrow Flight.
University of Pennsylvania | Computer Graphics TA & Guest Lecturer
- Mentored CIS 4600 students in C++, OpenGL, rendering, transformations, and debugging (2022–23).
- Delivered a creative-coding guest lecture and hands-on Hydra lab; co-organized Penn's first Algorave for 60+ attendees (Fall 2024).
DSP Work & Audio Projects
Independent | Freelance Programmer & Creative Technologist | Current
- Developing interactive audio and visual prototypes in Python, TouchDesigner, MediaPipe, OpenCV, and Hydra; available for scoped programming, integration, debugging, and technical documentation projects.
Audio DSP Portfolio | November 2026
- Built and published a reusable portfolio for audio DSP, interactive media, and exploratory medical-acoustics software, with demos, technical stacks, project notes, editable project data, and an interactive tone playground.
- Interactive guitar DSP: developing Mouth Wah Mini with MediaPipe jaw tracking, smoothed resonant-filter control, an OpenCV overlay, live-caption experiments, and evolving chord/note visualization; Finger Fuzz explores blues overdrive, punk distortion, and a finger-controlled wah.
- Audio-to-acoustics studies: exploring FFT spectral analysis, filtering, and reconstruction as a bridge from music to hearing and medical-acoustics research tools.
Stack: Python, TouchDesigner, MediaPipe, OpenCV, NumPy, FFT/IFFT; React, TypeScript, Web Audio API.
Graphics Projects
Chroma Portal | Hand-Controlled Psychedelic Shader | November 2026
Status: Source prototype; in development.
- Implemented two-hand MediaPipe tracking with four fingertip anchors, time-based smoothing, polygon validation, and tracking-loss fade for a masked camera effect.
- Developed an OpenCV reference compositor, TouchDesigner GLSL shader, and local RGB/control bridge with optional OSC output.
- Passed eight automated checks covering geometry, compositing, transport, and offscreen shader rendering. Live webcam and native TouchDesigner validation are pending.
Stack: Python, OpenCV, MediaPipe, NumPy, GLSL, TouchDesigner, OSC.
Project constellation · TouchDesigner network · Source code & setup
The Signal Attic | Interactive WebGL World | November 2026
- Built an original procedural attic studio with WebGL/GLSL shaders, lighting, perspective cameras, and a rotating signal cube.
- Implemented replay-safe absolute positions, authored object-class colors, mouse/touch/keyboard controls, PNG capture, and JSON state export in one standalone HTML file.
- Added a depth-buffered Canvas 2D fallback for browsers with WebGL disabled; verified responsive layouts and tested the GLSL shaders with an offscreen software render.
Stack: JavaScript, WebGL, GLSL, Canvas 2D, HTML/CSS.
AI / ML Projects
Keeks the Geek | Creative-Technology Chatbot | November 2026
- Built a responsive chatbot demo with 185 authored notes and a searchable catalog of 101 languages, libraries, platforms, and protocols spanning audio, graphics, creative coding, and AI.
- Implemented an Unsloth QLoRA fine-tuning pipeline for Qwen3-4B, with 233 synthetic training examples, 25 validation examples, response-only loss masking, and 25 held-out evaluation prompts.
- Added a Colab training notebook, reproducible run metadata, blinded base-versus-adapter evaluation, and a FastAPI adapter-serving interface. Fifteen pipeline tests pass; GPU training and model-quality evaluation are pending.
Stack: Python, Unsloth, Hugging Face Transformers/TRL, LoRA/QLoRA, FastAPI, JavaScript, HTML/CSS.
AI / ML project overview · 101 libraries & tools · Try Keeks the Geek · GitHub source & training notebook
Education & technical foundation
University of Pennsylvania | B.A.S. Computer Science, cum laude | Music minor | May 2023
- Signals/digital-audio coursework: FFT spectral analysis and MP3-style encoding concepts, including Huffman coding. Additional study in machine learning, algorithms, computer graphics, music theory, recording, and electronic music.
Northwestern Health Sciences University | Post-baccalaureate premedical sciences | 2025–present
Independent study: Coursera Digital Signal Processing; Andrew Ng AI and machine-learning coursework.
Community leadership & communication
Youthrive | Co-Chair | 2017–2019
- Helped organize the Nobel Peace Prize Youth Forum and contributed to an iBook reaching 6,000+ readers worldwide.
Courses & Certificates
NVIDIA Physical AI Agent Bootcamp | In progress | November 2026
Self-paced study of scene composition, camera controls, object identity, and physical AI workflows. Created The Signal Attic as an independent WebGL companion; NVIDIA RTX/OpenUSD labs remain pending.
Tools & music practice
Programming: Python, NumPy, C++, C#, Rust, MATLAB, SQL, Git, Linux, OpenGL.
Systems: REST APIs, Azure, CI/CD, Kubernetes, Helm, Jenkins, GitHub Actions, Prometheus/Grafana.
Creative: TouchDesigner, Hydra, MediaPipe, OpenCV, Ableton Live, Logic Pro; guitar, violin, and electronic music.