Looking for a job

Nikola Zifra

@nikolazifra

Message

I build and lead secure smart city, telematics, and cloud platforms.

United Arab Emirates

Message

What I'm looking for

I'm looking to lead engineering strategy and delivery for high-impact cloud, smart city, telematics, AI, or enterprise platforms, where I can build strong teams, modernize architecture, and work closely with executive stakeholders and customers.

At Emcode, I built and led a greenfield engineering organization delivering sovereign Smart City and telematics platforms across the UAE. I took architectural ownership of SecurePath during a critical leadership gap, stabilized delivery, and delivered a production rollout within eight months.

I’ve scaled platforms to $15,000,000 in revenue, 10,000+ clients, and 200,000+ connected vehicles for customers including Transguard Group and Al-Futtaim Group. I also delivered Ali, an AI-powered telematics LLM product for text-based interaction between operators and systems.

Previously, I built Udrafter’s software capability and technology roadmap, migrated its platform toward AWS Fargate, Kubernetes, and Aurora, and helped secure the £500,000 Nesta Rapid Recovery Challenge Job Stream prize. I founded Gocloud, an AWS cloud consultancy, and designed a unified Oracle Government Cloud API hub for Serbia’s citizen-data services.

I’ve led large distributed engineering teams, including 70 people delivering Dubai immigration products and a 40-person IoT delivery team at EPAM. My work spans architecture, cloud infrastructure, DevOps, SecDevOps, microservices, AI, and enterprise stakeholder leadership.

Experience

Work history, roles, and key accomplishments

Current

Head of Engineering

Current

Emcode Technology LLC

Mar 2023 - Present (3 years 5 months)

- Scaled flagship platform called Secure Path to 15,000,000 USD of revenue
- Stabilized legacy platform Secure Path experiencing Cassandra cluster latency issues due to a large data set (20TB)
- Delivered successor platform Secure Path X delivering 5x higher throughput with 10,000 payloads per second (pps) utilizing Kafka, ScyllaDB cluster, Redis cluster and PostgreSql in HA

Go Python 3 Scylla PostgreSQL Rancher RKE2 React React Native LLM EKS ECS Prometheus Grafana Jira Kafka EMQX

VP of Technology

Udrafter

May 2020 - Sep 2022 (2 years 4 months)

- Award-winning product feature roadmap for niche product offering hiring services to student interns
- Migrating from PaaS ElasticBeanstalk/RDS to advanced stateless PaaS AWS Fargate Kubernetes/AWS Aurora in a month's time
-Moving from PHP development to GoLang and building ML pipeline for recommendation engine
● Winning #Nesta Rapid Recovery Challenge Job
Stream with cash prize of 500,000 GBP

Vue.Js PHP Laravel Go C# .NET .NET Core Elasticsearch Amazon EKS AWS Fargate Elasticache Elastic Beanstalk

Chief Software Architect

Software Nation

Dec 2019 - Sep 2020 (9 months)

- Delivering a top-tier project in terms of allocated budget and strategic importance
- Goal was to unify gov. records on its 8,000,000
citizen population, delivering a unified API hub
deployed on Oracle Gov Cloud
- Micro-service architecture based on Command Query Response Segregation (CQRS) with request rate limiting