# Mufaro Shumba > Software Engineer | Software Development, AI Location: Washington DC-Baltimore Area, United States Profile: https://flows.cv/mufaro Software Engineer with over four years of experience building and modernizing scalable cloud solutions at Microsoft. While my core passion is in backend engineering, I am driven to apply my skills to the transformative challenges in AI, quantum computing, and fintech. During my time at Microsoft on the Xbox Player Support Experience team, my work involved the full scope of the development lifecycle. This included fully migrating legacy workflow services to Azure Durable Functions and redesigning front-end UIs with a component-based React pattern. This work in the cloud has deepened my expertise in distributed systems and DevOps practices. I enjoy streamlining developer workflows and have a track record of improving engineering practices by creating reusable tools and introducing thoughtful automation. My interest in AI is both professional and practical; I hold Azure AI certifications and have architected personal projects using containerized microservices and OpenAI's multimodal endpoints. Beyond AI, as a keen follower of economics, I'm drawn to fintech's power to boost the economy through simpler and more transparent payment systems. I'm also captivated by quantum computing and its potential to unlock a world of possibilities previously unimaginable for developers and society at large. I am actively seeking a backend-focused software engineering role at a large tech company or innovative startup where I can contribute my cloud and distributed systems expertise to a team tackling difficult problems. I'm especially excited by opportunities in AI, fintech, or deep tech. ## Work Experience ### Software Engineer @ Microsoft Jan 2021 – Jan 2025 | Redmond, Washington, United States As a Software Engineer for Xbox Player Support Experience team, my most recent work included cloud-native migrations and modernizing backend systems. Key aspects of this experience include fully migrating legacy workflow services to Azure Durable Functions. This initiative resulted in built-in auto-scaling, pay-per-use cost savings, improved telemetry, and the elimination of single-point failures across critical pipelines. I acted as the subject-matter expert for the XIP Jobs system, which involved merging over 100 pull requests, performing more than 200 code reviews, and resolving over 50 live-site incidents during 20+ on-call rotations. During each migration, I redesigned user interfaces, introducing a component-based React pattern and establishing the coding standard now used across new XIP jobs. I also participated in integrations with various organizations within the company. This work involved defining secure authentication contracts and data flows that reduced partner onboarding time. To improve engineering practices, I created reusable tools, such as a Durable-Functions helper library, to streamline developer workflows and save engineering time on subsequent migrations. Additionally, I introduced two-tier dev-spec templates that cut late-stage review churn by approximately 40%. ### Founder @ ProjectKufara Jan 2019 – Jan 2021 | College Park, Maryland I have been designing and implementing an app that is helping people become better storytellers by providing a quick way to learn. To carry out my project, I have utilized React Native, Typescript, GraphQL, and Firebase to build a native iOS and Android apps achieving high code reusability. My end goal for this project is helping students and professionals in my network to become better storytellers to help their communication skills and personal development. Throughout this project, I received experience in distributed systems, machine learning, database design, and API usage. ### Senior Team Member @ University of Maryland Office of Multi-ethnic Student Education Jan 2018 – Jan 2021 | College Park, Maryland I have mentored 30 underclass minority scholars by conducting workshops to develop professional and academic skills in a college atmosphere. I also Supported the creation of documents to assist with the promotion, operations, and budgeting of the program. At times I have, helped the director in managing and instructing courses on diversity and leadership. ### Software Engineer Intern @ Microsoft Jan 2020 – Jan 2020 I worked on the Growth Engineering team on Azure.com to improve the customer experience with experimentation. I used different experimentation tools and techniques to assist in conducting the tests. I've been able to create and validate A/B tests running across the site using a mixture of tools. In my time, I was able to help the team take steps towards launching a personalized site experience on Azure.com for different visitors. I have assisted in implementing advanced JSLL analytics across various Azure.microsoft.com touchpoints to gather a bit of information about visitors. Overall this internship was a great learning experience and intro into what it's like to work as a developer. ### OHUBxSXSW Cohort Scholar @ OHUB Jan 2020 – Jan 2020 ### Explorer Intern @ Microsoft Jan 2019 – Jan 2019 | Redmond, Washington I worked on the Azure team with two other interns and we were in charge of migrating a chatbot extension that is used internally by developers from an older platform into a new platform. One of the main goals of this project was to gain an understanding of Azure Cognitive Services such as Language Understanding and QnA maker to let the current chatbot become 'smarter' when interacting with its users. To achieve this goal, we utilized development tools like TypeScript, ReactJS, and Kusto to retrieve interactions between customers and a chatbot. Throughout the process, we were using agile project management techniques to achieve our goals. As a team, we are designing an intuitive UI for developers to interact with the extension and increase their performance while reviewing chatbot and customer interactions. ### Code U Participant @ Google Jan 2019 – Jan 2019 I collaborated with a team of peers to design and implement a web application using Java, JavaScript, HTML and CSS, leveraging various Google Cloud Platform APIs, including App Engine, Datastore and Vision. I also had the chance to learn and follow industry best practices such as: contributing to open source software using Git and GitHub, conducting regular code reviews with teammates, extending an existing codebase, distributed development, designing new components and interfaces and leading them to completion. I also got to Implemented a feature that allows users to reply to messages on the public feed of the forum. ### Growth Marketing Intern @ Jumpstart Jan 2019 – Jan 2019 | College Park, Maryland I was selected from a pool of thousands of candidates to work closely with the Jumpstart team to build out a machine learning recruiting platform. I also helped to pilot new features, provide student feedback, and act as a product advisor on campus. I was able to leverage various growth strategies and tools, including email marketing, social media campaigns, and presentations/demos. I had the chance to network with tech companies to bring industry professionals and recruiters on campus. ### Founder @ Immerse Yourself Jan 2018 – Jan 2019 | College Park, Maryland I have brought together an interdisciplinary group of determined individuals from different backgrounds on improving the current state of our countries educational system. We targeted emerging deep learning holographic technologies to assist us with our goal. an existing Experiments with Google Project “Scribbling Speech” as a starting point to build our product. We plan to move toUnity to build a database of augmented reality objects to be used to train our deep learning model. After this step, we plan to use Python paired with TensorFlow to caption these augmented reality objects. We want to provide a better platform and educational environment to improve the quality of teaching in underperforming classrooms. These innovative methods will allow students to be intrigued and better access the tools needed to spark and maintain their intellectual curiosity. We believe that the power to visualize something can inspire and improve the lives of individuals all over the country, but it starts in schools. We know that there are kids who lack access to specific educational resources and through Immerse Yourself we hope to bridge this gap. ### Challenge Contestant @ Halite Challange Created by Two Sigma Jan 2018 – Jan 2019 | College Park, Maryland I worked in a group of 3 students to develop bots in to interact with a 2D map to collect in-game tokens. I competed with teams across the world to see whose bot is the best at completing the objectives of the game. We made a supervised learning bot, and a started to experiment with "genetic algorithms" to try and boost the efficiency of the bots. I strengthened my previously learned Python and data science skills in the competition. ### Undergraduate Research Fellow in Cybersecurity @ Bowie State University Jan 2018 – Jan 2018 | Washington D.C. Metro Area Worked with two other undergraduate students and two faculty mentors on a research paper focused on the discovery of Cyber Threat Intelligence from dark web hacker forums using machine learning. Prepared a data set that contained forum posts from the dark-net and used WEKA to train and test models on a to classify each threat as either system a system, web, mobile, database, website or network threat. We created a research paper and poster going over our findings and presented the poster at the Summer Undergraduate Research Institute (SURI) symposium at the end of the program. ### Project Assistant @ Kudzai Consulting Group Jan 2014 – Jan 2017 | Baltimore, Maryland Area I collected and tracked conversations from a Smart Home device (i.e., Google Home or Alexa) to understand whether we are being recorded without “activating” the device. Through the process, we verified that Smart Home devices do record our voices even if they are not activated. My supervisor used the findings to help put together a report explaining how the information and voice recordings are securely stored in the cloud. ## Education ### Bachelor of Science in Computer Science University of Maryland Jan 2017 – Jan 2021 ## Contact & Social - LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/mshumba - Website: https://ProjectKufara.com --- Source: https://flows.cv/mufaro JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/mufaro/resume.json Last updated: 2026-03-29