Akila Hidell

Lead Full Stack Engineer

Skillful • Freelance

Jun 2023 - Present • 3 yrs 4 mos

• Own end-to-end development of Skillfully, an AI-powered hiring platform serving 100K+ users (React/Next.js, NestJS, PostgreSQL). • Architect and build the infrastructure behind the AI job simulation engine (chat, email, and voice interviews via OpenAI and LiveKit) and a self-serve generator that turns job descriptions into simulations. This work helped raise $2.5M. • Design an async evaluation pipeline (AWS Lambda, Step Functions, SQS) that routes candidate sessions through ML scoring and returns hire/no-hire recommendations. • Migrated the infrastructure from manual EC2 deployments to AWS ECS with CI/CD. Deploys went from 1 hour to 15 minutes, and uptime is no longer a concern. • Optimize PostgreSQL schemas and queries on tables with 2.9M+ rows. Report pages that took 1 minute to load now render in under 3 seconds. • Lead a team of 3 software engineers building the platform end to end (technical direction, architecture decisions, code reviews). • Set up Cypress end-to-end testing for the main user flows, catching regressions before they hit production.

Software Developer

LinkedIn • Freelance

May 2021 - Sep 2023 • 2 yrs 4 mos

• Developed Diwala’s cloud infrastructure with Terraform for a platform with 5K+ active users. • Ran PostgreSQL migrations without interrupting user access. • Built a React.js template engine that generates PDF documents with automatic content adjustment. • Built a worker system that auto-generates OpenGraph images for social media previews.

Associate Software Engineer

Tavistock Group • Full-time

Jul 2020 - Apr 2021 • 9 mos

• Revamped legacy cash flow management software and brought the project from critical to stable health. • Ran Bash scripting best-practice workshops for the Embedded Engineering department.