Kidus Yohannes — Lead AI/ML Engineer
Addis AbabaI build AI that ships.
Agentic AI, retrieval systems, and the full-stack products that put them in front of people. Currently machine learning at Global Travel Collection and leading AI at Shega.
Work
Global Travel Collection · Internova
NowMachine Learning Engineer. Document intelligence over supplier policy, explainable analytics, PII anonymization on Fabric.
Shega Media & Technology
2024 – nowLead AI/ML Engineer. The retrieval, agent and streaming platform behind Ask Shega.
Software Factory
OngoingArchitect and lead engineer. An AI-native SDLC platform, an agent at every pipeline stage.
Mind-Bloom
OngoingCo-founder. AI wellness platform for African youth, in Amharic and English.
Alenelachehu Charitable Organization
2024 – nowVolunteer CTO. A mental-health platform and a Telegram bot backend for a charity.
Projects
Ask Shega (opens in a new tab)
An AI research assistant for Ethiopia’s innovation economy: ask about companies, FDI, deals and market trends, get verified, source-backed answers.
Derash · ደራሽ (opens in a new tab)
Direct giving for Ethiopia. Donations go straight to the beneficiary’s Telebirr or bank account — Derash never holds funds — and every birr is verified against the payment provider before it counts.
ML Roadmap (opens in a new tab)
Zero to a deployed machine learning system through forty gated nodes across eight phases. Each node gives you a goal, two resources, a coding session and a checklist you can genuinely fail.
Hall of Fame (opens in a new tab)
A living record of the wins coming out of the tech community: accelerator acceptances, funding rounds, launches, new roles, awards and open-source milestones.
Creator Match (opens in a new tab)
Reads every tracked Telegram channel, profiles each creator’s vibe with an LLM, and pairs the ones who would actually hit it off.
Unsaid (opens in a new tab)
Somewhere to put the thing you can’t say out loud. No account and no name — post it anonymously, sorted by what it is about, and let other people tell you they heard it.
STARK Hackathon (opens in a new tab)
The site for a 24-day, voice-first hackathon with a 50,000 ETB prize pool: brief, format, requirements, prizes, sponsors and judges, all on one page.
Vice Coast 08 (opens in a new tab)
An original open-world driving game in the browser: a 3D coastal city with street races, timed jobs, free roam, a radio and a working speedometer.
tictac (opens in a new tab)
Tic-tac-toe against an AI that always wins. It removes, relocates and repurposes your marks, logs every incident, and denies all of them.
Building
Personal Internet
A personal knowledge OS. Everything I read, save and write, indexed and queryable.
Agent Memory
A memory layer for long-running agents, plus the local GPU buildout to train and serve against it.
Amharic Tokenizer
A tokenizer built for Ethiopic script, because the default ones shred Amharic into nonsense.
LLM Stream Debugger
A tool for watching a token stream as it arrives, so you can see exactly where a generation goes wrong.
R&D Lab
Open-ended experiments. Currently biological computing, and what Cortical Labs is doing with neurons on silicon.
Writing
Retrieval quality is the whole product.
Everything else in a retrieval-augmented system is plumbing. Notes from running one in production over Ethiopian economic data.