Reza Kermani
Portrait of Reza Kermani

Head of Software · Optimotive Technologies

Full-stack, cloud & AI engineering leader.

Grew from junior developer to Head of Software in two and a half years, building the platform that took a robotics company from zero to five enterprise customers.

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Windsor, Ontario, Canada

About

I'm a software engineer and Head of Software at Optimotive Technologies, which builds autonomous inspection robots for the construction and energy sectors. I joined as a junior developer straight out of the University of Toronto, when the company had no customers, and now lead the engineering team behind a commercial platform deployed with enterprise clients.

I enjoy owning problems end to end. In a given week that can mean a Python backend service, a TypeScript dashboard, a performance investigation, and the CI/CD and cloud infrastructure that ties it all together. I was an early adopter of AI-assisted development, and it is now central to how my team builds.

Beyond the code, I hire, mentor, and set technical direction, and I work directly with customers and leadership so that what we build solves real problems. My working style is simple: build quickly, iterate quickly, and treat nothing as done until it has been proven against real data.

Experience

Head of Software

Optimotive Technologies

May 2022 – Present

Junior Developer → Software Developer → Head of Software (Oct 2024)

  • Own the end-to-end software platform (backend services, web applications, data, cloud, and CI/CD) and lead a team of developers, a co-op student, and an AI engineer through bi-weekly sprints.
  • Delivered an automated data-capture application that replaced a manual, labor-intensive process for enterprise customers, cutting their cost per unit by about 25% and running about 55% faster.
  • Consolidated scattered single-purpose prototypes into one configuration-driven platform, with reusable subsystems extracted as versioned, packaged libraries.
  • Built a closed-loop, AI-assisted development pipeline in which an agent edits code, builds images, deploys, runs guarded tests, and iterates, and drove adoption of agentic coding across the team.
  • Built Python services and REST APIs and a React / TypeScript dashboard, deployed on AWS with Docker and GitHub Actions.
  • Built system-wide observability and diagnostics used to catch regressions and root-cause failures in the field.
  • Hire, interview, and mentor engineers, set the technical roadmap and architecture, and own code review, release management, and incident response.

Software Mentor & Provincial Judge

FIRST Robotics Competition, Teams 4903 & 1229

2022 – 2026

  • Mentored students in software engineering, architecture, and version control; served as a Provincial Judge at the 2024 Ontario competition.

B.Sc. (Honours), Computer Science Specialist

University of Toronto · Minor in Mathematics and Statistics

2018 – 2022

Selected work

Configuration-driven robotics platform

One platform serving every product variant of a fleet of autonomous inspection robots: real-time control, perception, and multi-sensor integration on embedded Linux and NVIDIA Jetson.

C++ · Python · ROS 2 · Jetson

Production computer vision

Detection, segmentation, and tracking models in production, fed by an auto-labeling data pipeline that keeps training data growing with every deployment.

PyTorch · CV · Data pipelines

Fleet dashboards & cloud

Real-time monitoring and control dashboards with live data streaming, backed by REST APIs and multi-arch Docker images shipped through GitHub Actions to AWS behind Cloudflare.

React · TypeScript · AWS · Docker

arkov

An independent web and infrastructure platform on self-managed cloud: full-stack apps, Stripe subscription billing, and an LLM agent integrated with telephony and a consent-gated CRM.

Hetzner · Caddy · Claude · Twilio · Stripe

Skills

Languages
Python, C++, TypeScript / JavaScript, SQL, Bash, C
Backend & APIs
REST APIs, microservices, real-time and concurrent systems, relational databases, telemetry
Web
React, Vite, Node.js, Svelte
Cloud & DevOps
AWS (EC2, S3, Lambda, RDS), Docker, GitHub Actions, infrastructure-as-code, Cloudflare, Linux
AI & ML
PyTorch, computer vision, LLM integration (Claude), agentic development, model deployment
Robotics
ROS 2, real-time control, sensor integration, NVIDIA Jetson
Leadership
Hiring, mentoring, code review, technical roadmap, agile delivery, customer communication
Spoken
English (native), Farsi (native), Spanish (beginner)

Contact

Open to conversations about engineering leadership, full-stack, and applied AI roles.