Kais Dukes

Kais Dukes is the current Head of Engineering at Zilch. Prior to this, they were with Zilch Technology Limited from November 2020 to June 2021 as the Head of Engineering. In this role, they were responsible for the hands-on engineering leadership of 6 agile teams at a hypergrowth tech startup/scaleup. This included managing 50 headcount and ensuring that the full-stack Engineering and DevOps teams built highly-scalable web, mobile, and cloud solutions.

During their time at Zilch, Kais was responsible for global ownership of software delivery by creating a high-performing engineering culture. Kais also oversaw the technology strategy and delivery for Zilch's core product lines and played a key role in scaling the business by growing multiple agile software engineering teams. In addition, they implemented a distributed systems architecture to support exponential growth as a business. Throughout all of this, they helped the team balance high-impact delivery while addressing technical debt.

The technology stack used during their time at Zilch included React / Redux + TypeScript + React Native, AWS / Docker / Java / Spring / Micronaut / API Gateway, and high-performance Java REST and event-based microservices. Redis, SQL, distributed queuing, messaging, and caching were also used.

During their time at Zilch, Kais scaled the department from 5 to 50 hires during a period of rapid hypergrowth. Kais introduced pair programming for

Kais Dukes has a Master of Science in Mathematics from Imperial College London and a PhD in Artificial Intelligence from the University of Leeds.

Kais Dukes reports to Thomas K Matecki, CTO.