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Yakov Shmidt

@yakovshmidt

Senior Software Engineer at Apple Services Engineering, improving recommendations for Podcasts, TV, and Music with 95% lower latency.

United Kingdom

Message

At Apple Services Engineering, I design and build core systems powering Podcasts, TV, and Music recommendations. I replaced LLM-based candidate selection with deterministic post-filtering, cutting latency by 95% and eliminating inference costs.

Previously, I built reliable earnings systems at Uber and customer-data and event-tracing systems at Citi. At MN Partners, I engineered the National Educational Database, and at Tan Technologies I delivered an e-commerce platform.

Experience

Work history, roles, and key accomplishments

Current

Senior Software Engineer

Current

Apple

Jun 2025 - Present (1 year 5 months)

Designing and building core systems for Podcasts, TV, and Music recommendations. Replaced LLM-based candidate selection with deterministic post-filtering, cutting latency by 95% and eliminating inference costs.

Java Go Kafka FoundationDB Voldemort Milvus Hadoop Spark MemCached Redis Docker Kubernetes

Software Engineer

Uber

May 2024 - Jun 2025 (1 year 1 month)

Built reliable systems for the Earnings Platform ensuring accurate earnings for millions of drivers. Led the Colorado Earner Statements regulatory launch and architected a payout vs. receipt discrepancies detection platform.

Go Java Python Spring Boot Apache Hive Hadoop Spark Kafka gRPC Unit Testing Integration Testing E2E Testing

Senior Software Engineer & Assistant Vice President

Citi

Oct 2021 - May 2024 (2 years 7 months)

Designed and developed a data collection set of modules for the Know Your Customer program, reducing manual work by ~90%. Consistently appointed as Interim Team Lead for 3 senior-level engineers.

Kotlin Java Spring Boot Spring Cloud Coroutines Reactor Kafka MongoDB AOP Groovy Gradle Docker Kubernetes

Senior Software Engineer & Team Lead

MN Partners

Jul 2018 - May 2021 (2 years 10 months)

Engineered the National Educational Database (20K+ requests/s), automating data processing and reducing paperwork by ~70%. Led a team of 4 engineers and improved search time by 5x through SQL optimization.

Kotlin Java Spring Boot Hibernate MSSQL MongoDB Junit Selenium CI CD Git Maven Liquibase REST APIs

Software Engineer

Tan Technologies

Oct 2015 - Nov 2017 (2 years 1 month)

Delivered an e-commerce platform, increasing partner revenue by ~10%. Led a team of 2 engineers, owning technical design, implementation, and delivery of all project features.

Java Java FX Spring Framework Spring Boot Spring Data Spring MVC Hibernate PostgreSQL H2 Database JSP Git Junit Mockito

Education

Degrees, certifications, and relevant coursework

Karaganda State Technical University

Bachelor of Computer Science, Computer Science

2011 - 2015

Grade: 3.71/4.0

Activities and societies: Successfully completed the EPAM/KSTU Java Web Development training, securing a spot as a Software Engineering Intern at EPAM.

Bachelor of Computer Science degree from Karaganda State Technical University from 2011 to 2015.