About

Zain Kabani is a Software Engineer II at Instacart, passionate about Machine Learning and Data Infrastructure. With over 4 years of relevant experience, Zain has worked with some of the biggest names in the tech industry, including Amazon and IBM. Currently, he is building a pgbouncer proxy replacement in Rust at Instacart. At Amazon, Zain worked as a Solutions Architect, creating highly scalable and resilient solutions using AWS. He architected and implemented a Machine Learning Ops solution to help data science teams continuously deploy their models by using SageMaker and Step Functions. He also leveraged Lambda to create an API for configuring model training pipelines and monitoring progress, scaling to manage 100+ models concurrently with the use of serverless technology. Zain worked closely with external clients to validate features and scope of the project, creating design documents and architecture diagrams. He also implemented an update of the AWS Serverless Bot Framework solution to enable secure use of third-party API keys with Lambda. At IBM, Zain worked as a Software Engineer, where he architected a platform to streamline machine learning workflows from data ingestion to model deployment using Kubernetes. He designed a framework to automate the deployment of ETL jobs configured with YAML files, built using Jenkins, GitHub, Kafka, and Spark. Zain also wrote a service in Go to elastically scale Kubernetes using Prometheus metrics, which reduced resource usage by 60% and costs by 300%. He led a project to introduce Jenkins for TDD and CI/CD to encourage the use of best practices. Zain configured JupyterHub on Kubernetes to enable the use of cloud-hosted Jupyter Notebooks for a team of 10 data scientists. He also contributed to an open-source project, Jupyter Enterprise Gateway, by implementing a feature to support Spark on Kubernetes. Zain holds an Honors Bachelor of Science (HBSc) degree, specializing in Statistical Machine Learning and Data Mining, from the University of Toronto. He is skilled in Software Engineering, AWS, ML, infra, Sagemaker, Kubernetes, Jupyter, Senior Software Engineering, Data Science, Web, Jenkins, Spark, CI/CD, Kafka, and ETL. Apart from work, Zain is interested in hockey and hockey analytics.