Avtandil Kikabidze

Principal Software Architect
Tbilisi, Georgia | akalongman@gmail.com | LinkedIn | GitHub

Executive Summary

Elite Senior Software Architect with 15 years of experience engineering high-availability, enterprise-grade systems. Recognized at the national level as a Co-Author of the Georgian Vocational Training Android Development Curriculum Standard and a technical expert for WorldSkills Georgia. Proven track record of directing teams of up to 20 personnel to design distributed architectures handling 3M+ daily hits and 100M+ database rows. Specialized in modernizing legacy infrastructures, orchestrating zero-downtime DevOps pipelines across multi-node clusters, and delivering scalable, AI-enhanced solutions for major national universities, petroleum enterprises, and government entities.

Select Architectural & Open Source Contributions

National Media Infrastructure: Architected the digital infrastructure for top-tier Georgian media and news agencies, including Ambebi, InterPressNews, and PalitraTV, ensuring high availability during massive traffic spikes.
Government & Enterprise Portals: Developed critical public-facing systems, including the official website of the Parliament of Georgia, the Georgian National Examination Center (naec.ge), and universal payment systems (UniPay, Smartivi).
Open Source Development: Creator and maintainer of highly adopted developer tools, including the “PHP Telegram Bot” API library, “Laravel Multilang,” and widely used Python workflow plugins for Sublime Text (AutoBackups, CodeFormatter).

Professional Experience

Consulting Principal Architect | Independent Advisory Practice 01/2022 – Present | Tbilisi, Georgia (Remote / Global Client Base) Operating as a Fractional Chief Architect, driving digital transformation, system modernization, and scalable infrastructure design for enterprise clients and academic institutions:

AI & Automation Integration: Architected a sophisticated multi-agent AI ecosystem utilizing Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) and custom tool-calling, enabling highly contextualized enterprise knowledge retrieval and automated workflow execution.
Caucasus International University: Architected the comprehensive refactoring of the institution’s legacy Learning Management System (LMS). Engineered and integrated a secure, high-availability billing infrastructure to process university tuition, directly supporting institutional revenue streams.
Inex Group: Direct the strategic design and deployment of highly scalable, distributed backend services. Orchestrated immutable cloud infrastructure (IaC) utilizing Terraform and Ansible, standardizing enterprise-grade environment provisioning and mitigating technical debt.
PowerPay: Provide executive-level software architecture consulting, guiding external engineering teams on system design, technology stack selection, and enterprise-grade infrastructure optimization.

Chief Software Engineer | Tbilisi State Medical University 10/2024 – Present | Tbilisi, Georgia

Direct the enterprise architecture and technical strategy for national medical education systems, ensuring scalability to support 10K concurrent users across the institution.
Lead and mentor a cross-functional engineering team, establishing rigorous code review protocols and unified development standards that reduced system complexity and deployment times.
Oversee the end-to-end lifecycle of critical internal tools and web services, dictating high-level component architecture and technology stacks.
Pioneered the integration of AI-driven automated code review, drastically reducing deployment friction and human error.

Senior Software Engineer | SOCAR Georgia Petroleum 02/2019 – Present | Tbilisi, Georgia

Engineered the backend architecture for “my.sgp.ge”, an online management cabinet servicing 50K enterprise and retail users.
Engineered secure API integrations with external enterprise financial systems, ensuring high-throughput and fault-tolerant transaction processing.
Directed the stabilization of mission-critical legacy applications by engineering comprehensive automated testing suites, systematically mitigating technical debt and ensuring zero-regression continuous delivery.

Chief Software Engineer | Ilia State University 09/2018 – 09/2024 | Tbilisi, Georgia

Architected and scaled “argus.iliauni.edu.ge”, the primary electronic learning management system coordinating administration and academic processes for 15K students and faculty.
Designed algorithms and highly scalable database schemas capable of processing intense load spikes during peak academic enrollment periods.
Engineered advanced CI/CD infrastructure to orchestrate concurrent, zero-downtime deployments across a 20+ server cluster.
Designed and deployed comprehensive observability and real-time alerting architectures (Grafana, InfluxDB, Loki, Telegraf), integrating automated incident routing via Slack and WhatsApp to drastically reduce Mean Time to Recovery (MTTR).

Senior Software Engineer | iMovies LLC 09/2017 – 08/2018 | Tbilisi, Georgia

Scaled backend infrastructure for the number one movie portal in Georgia, managing loads exceeding 50K concurrent video streams.
Built a highly optimized, smart search engine utilizing ElasticSearch with custom weighting and boosting algorithms, drastically improving content discoverability for end-users.
Executed rigorous load testing utilizing jMeter to identify bottlenecks, subsequently refactoring legacy databases to ensure zero-downtime during peak traffic spikes.

Software Engineer | Prezly BBVA 09/2016 – 08/2017 | Leuven, Belgium

Engineered core features for a globally adopted PR CRM platform used by major enterprise brands, including Google. Optimized legacy codebase and expanded unit/integration testing coverage, ensuring platform stability during rapid scaling phases.

Senior Software Developer | ITDC LLC 01/2012 – 08/2016 | Tbilisi, Georgia

Architected and deployed proprietary Content Management Systems (CMS) and native Android applications (Java) for a diverse portfolio of clients. Streamlined development workflows by authoring custom Python-based tooling.

Senior Web Developer | WebSolutions LLC 07/2009 – 12/2011 | Tbilisi, Georgia

Led the technical delivery of high-performance web applications and custom CMS architectures. Modernized internal development lifecycles by integrating Subversion (SVN) version control across the engineering team.

National Honors & Industry Contributions

Technical Speaker: Presented on Enterprise Web Application Security and vulnerability mitigation at the PHP International Conference (Tbilisi, Georgia), instructing regional engineering professionals on secure architectural practices.
Curriculum Co-Author: Drafted the official Georgian Vocational Training Android Development Curriculum Standard, setting the educational baseline for the nation.
Appointed Technical Judge: Evaluated and shaped emerging tech talent as a Web Design Expert for WorldSkills Georgia.

Technical Expertise

AI & Machine Learning: Large Language Models (LLMs), Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), Multi-Agent Systems, OpenAI API, AI Code Review Integrations.
Architecture & DevOps: Distributed Systems, AWS, DigitalOcean, Docker, Kubernetes, CI/CD (Jenkins, Travis), Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, Ansible), Zero-Downtime Deployments, Observability & Alerting (Grafana, InfluxDB, Loki, Telegraf), Message Queues (RabbitMQ), Caching (Redis, Memcached, Varnish).
Backend Engineering: PHP (15+ Years - Laravel, Symfony), Python (Django), RESTful API Design, ElasticSearch.
Database Scaling: MySQL (High Proficiency), PostgreSQL. Proven expertise designing schemas managing 10M+ rows and optimizing architectures for loads exceeding 3M hits/day.
Methodologies: Domain-Driven Design (DDD), OOP/OOAD, TDD, Load Testing (jMeter), Agile Leadership.

Education

Bachelor with Major in Engineering Sciences Technical University of Georgia
Certificate of Web Programming Ilia State University

Languages

Georgian: Native
English: Professional Working Proficiency (B2)
Russian: Bilingual/Native Proficiency (C1)