seattle, wa render: —ms
Software Engineer · Backend & Infra

Lily Oforiwa Sam

Software engineer with 3 years of experience building backend systems that move money in real time at Deutsche Bank. Lately, I've been pulled toward AI safety and model calibration, and I've been contributing to open source projects in the side.

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I was born and raised in Ghana, and I'm currently based in the US. I'm an enthusiastic, goal-oriented software engineer with a passion for building robust solutions. I'm passionate about teaching and mentoring others and I'm always looking for opportunities to learn and grow as a developer, so I consider myself a lifelong learner.

My 3 years of software engineering experience spans across various domains: backend development, frontend development, and infrastructure. The nature of my work at Deutsche Bank led me to develop an interest in AI safety and overconfidence, and I've recently built an independent calibration framework evaluating Llama-3.1-8B and other models on the Spider text-to-SQL benchmark.

Education

Columbia University
BA, Computer Science
Aug 2019 — May 2023
John W. Kluge Scholar · TA for COMS 4111 (Databases) · 2x Dean's List

Skills

Languages & Frameworks
Java / Spring BootPythonSQLFlask
Databases & Infrastructure
KafkaMongoDBGKE / GCPTerraformGitHub Actions
Emerging Focus
AI SecurityModel CalibrationLLM Eval
Lead Software Engineer
Stealth Startup based in Francophone Africa
Aug 2026 — Present
Backend and cloud infrastructure for real-time payment processing. Worked across several Java/Spring Boot microservices, Kafka event pipelines, MongoDB, deployed on GKE with Terraform-managed infra and GitHub Actions CI/CD.
Spring BootKafkaGKE
Software Engineer II
Deutsche Bank — Instant Payments
July 2023 — July 2026
  • Joined as Graduate Analyst Jul 2023

    Joined as a Graduate Analyst through the Grad Rotation Program and worked in the Instant Payments and RFT Market Risk teams.

  • Promoted to Software Engineer I (Instant Payments) Sep 2024

    Became a DB Grad mentor and led a small team of interns on Instant Payments projects.

  • Promoted to Software Engineer II (Instant Payments) Mar 2026

    Developed new features for the Instant Payment platform - Outbound and Proxy Payments.

Backend and cloud infrastructure for real-time payment processing. Worked across several Java/Spring Boot microservices, Kafka event pipelines, MongoDB, deployed on GKE with Terraform-managed infra and GitHub Actions CI/CD.
Spring BootKafkaGKE
Teaching Assistant, COMS 4111
Columbia University — Graduate Databases Course
Sep 2022 — May 2023
Supported graduate-level coursework in backend database systems through grading and office hours.
PostgreSQLMongoDBRedis
Software Engineer Intern
Amazon
May 2022 — Aug 2022
Developed a payments service API surfacing health insurance contract data to enterprise and consumer clients; shipped the React/TypeScript frontend (Harmony, AWS Polaris) and deployed and maintained the service on AWS resources like ECS, Fargate, S3, DynamoDB.
ReactTypeScriptAWS
Tech Developer Intern
Sponsors of Educational Opportunity (SEO)
June 2021 — Aug 2021
Built a full stack web app using the New York Times API using Python and Flask.
PythonFlaskREST API
LLM Calibration on Text-to-SQL
Independent framework evaluating Llama-3.1-8B on the Spider Text-to-SQL benchmark, measuring how well the model's confidence matches its actual accuracy; a core AI-security question for anything that lets a model act autonomously.
ECE: 0.2840
Llama-3.1-8BSpider BenchmarkGroq API
French Study App
A spaced-practice app built for TCF Canada / TEF Canada prep, currently at B1 level material. FastAPI backend, React (Vite) frontend.
FastAPIReactVite