Washington, D.C. area  /  M.S. Electrical Engineering

Ribka
Tiruneh

Backend Engineer, real-time and distributed services

I build systems that run in production and the measurements that prove they work. I shipped a real-time audio and messaging platform end to end, from API design through deployment on GCP, and I have gone into a large C++ and CUDA codebase to find the reason two execution paths disagreed. Coauthor on an IEEE security workshop paper on compliance for sensitive health data in the cloud.

Get in touch GitHub LinkedIn
Signal trace p99 request latency  /  live

steady state anomaly, traced to root cause The same trace reads as a latency graph or a spike raster. Both are things I have had to debug.

1
production system built,
deployed, and operated end to end
2
publications, including
IEEE SPW 2026
3.97
graduate GPA
George Washington University
4
engineering and research roles
across the U.S. and South Korea

What I do

Three things I am good at

Every one of these came out of shipping something and then having to keep it running.

Case study

A real-time system I owned end to end

At NEOALI I built and ran the platform behind an assistive communication product used by people with severe speech impairments. Audio had to arrive in real time, model inference could not block the request path, and sessions had to degrade rather than drop. Select any component to see what it involved.

Scroll sideways to see the whole path, tap a box for detail

React NativeiOS, Android WebRTCreal-time audio FastAPIREST, auth, routing WebSocketstreaming, sessions Async workersretries, idempotency Llama 3 + RAGinference, retrieval MongoDBschemas, access paths GCPdeploy, observability
Select a component Every box here is something I wrote, deployed, or was paged about. Hover or tap to read what it involved.

Experience

Where I have worked

Titles are as they appear on the record, with a short note on what the work actually was.

Selected work

Projects

Filter by area. Code for several of these is on GitHub.

Published

Publications

01
IEEE SPW 2026Security & compliance

Cyberbiosecurity Risk Assessment Framework for Genomic Data Storage in Cloud Environments

A. T. Chufare, R. Tiruneh & S. B. Juja  /  2026 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy Workshops  /  May 2026

02
ProQuest indexedM.S. thesis

Pattern Formation and Retrieval in a Reduced-Scale CA3-Inspired Neural Network

R. Tiruneh  /  M.S. Thesis, The George Washington University, 2026  /  ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global

Capabilities

Skills

Highlighted groups are the ones most relevant to the current lens.

Record

Education and honors

M.S. Electrical Engineering  GPA 3.97 / 4.0

The George Washington University, Washington, D.C.  /  May 2024 to May 2026

Thesis advised by Prof. Gina C. Adam, supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science. Coursework in Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning, Stochastic Processes, Linear Systems Theory, Computer Architecture and Design, Big Data and Cloud Computing, Machine Intelligence.

B.S. Computer Science

KAIST, Daejeon, South Korea  /  September 2017 to May 2022

Semi-minor in Artificial Intelligence. Double major in Business and Technology Management. Coursework in Operating Systems, Systems Programming, Computer Networks, Computer Organization, Algorithms, Data Structures, Natural Language Processing, Text Mining.

Honors and awards

Lim Mi-sook ScholarshipKAIST, 2021
Yoon-Kim AwardKAIST, 2020
Line ScholarshipKAIST, 2019
Full-Ride ScholarshipKAIST, 2017 to 2021

Contact

Happy to talk about systems that have to stay up.

Open to backend and machine learning engineering roles. Based in the Washington, D.C. area, comfortable with hybrid, on-site, or distributed teams.

GitHub
@ribkatam
LinkedIn
in/ribka-tiruneh