Tolaz Hewa
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Tolaz Hewa

Senior Software Engineer (Distributed Systems, AI/RAG)

Toronto, ON

Senior Engineer focused on technical excellence and end-to-end ownership. 6+ years building and scaling backend infrastructure across distributed systems in regulated environments (FinTech, Social, Supply Chain). Experienced in driving engineering velocity through improved tooling, codegen, and rigorous testing standards. Areas of depth include distributed systems, backend architecture, compliance infrastructure, and AI/ML platform engineering.

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Experience

Software Engineer

Robinhood

Nov 2024 - Present Toronto, ON
  • Built a governance platform for AI/ML agents, including model registries and retrieval-aware schema validation.
  • Standardized database patterns across high-scale services; delivered a centralized DB package with SLO alerting.
  • Implemented a cross-system Rules Engine to encode complex legal policy decisions in deterministic backend logic.
  • Authored a protobuf-based codegen framework to centralize shared schemas and eliminate drift across distributed services.
  • Led backend refactors that raised unit test coverage from ~10% to ~70% in critical paths.
Go Python Protobuf RAG LLM PostgreSQL Kubernetes

Software Engineer

Meta

Jun 2022 - Jun 2023 San Francisco, CA / Toronto, ON
  • Designed and implemented a Compliance Decision Engine unifying jurisdiction resolution and policy evaluation across product surfaces.
  • Built audit-grade logging and metrics pipelines with end-to-end trace propagation across distributed systems.
  • Contributed to internal tooling that surfaced policy insights and accelerated onboarding for product teams.
Distributed Systems React TypeScript Compliance Logging Metrics

Software Development Engineer

Amazon

Aug 2019 - Mar 2022 Toronto, ON
  • Designed and shipped high-throughput backend services using Java, DynamoDB, and event-driven architectures.
  • Founding engineer for a supply chain optimization product; built core services and data pipelines from scratch.
  • Delivered resilient workflows for global logistics data, including warehousing infrastructure for analytics and decisioning.
Java DynamoDB AWS Event-Driven Architecture Data Pipelines

Tech Stack

Languages

Java Go Python SQL TypeScript C++ Rust

Backend Systems

Microservices gRPC / Protobuf Transactions Event-Driven Arch Rules Engines REST

Search & AI Infra

RAG Applications Vector Retrieval LLM Evals/Guardrails Model Registries Databricks / ETL

Databases / Infra

DynamoDB PostgreSQL MongoDB Kubernetes / Docker AWS (S3, SQS, SNS) Terraform / CDK

Frontend

React React Context Next.js TRPC

Education

B.S. in Computer Science (Honours)

Ryerson University

2014 - 2019 Toronto, ON

Data Science with Python

HarvardX

2023 San Francisco, CA