Salomon Kabongo
Lead Software Engineer at State Farm
Normal, Illinois, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolSalomon Kabongo is a Lead Software Engineer and AI/NLP researcher with a PhD in Computer Science from Leibniz University Hannover and eight years of industry experience driving production-grade ML systems. He blends deep research—transforming human-readable research papers into machine-actionable knowledge using NLP, information extraction, and knowledge graphs—with hands-on engineering of AWS serverless and distributed pipelines at enterprise scale. At State Farm he leads applied AI projects that balance scientific rigor with business impact, and his publication record reflects a sustained focus on model evaluation, benchmarking, and multilingual translation. An active open-source contributor, he has helped bootstrap machine translation for African languages (notably work on English–Tshiluba in the masakhane-mt project), highlighting his commitment to inclusive NLP. Comfortable moving between research labs and production teams, he excels at turning complex algorithms into reliable, deployable systems. He also brings a non-obvious math-first perspective from advanced studies in mathematics, which informs his principled approach to model design and evaluation.
8 years of coding experience
6 years of employment as a software developer
Nanodegree Deep learning, Nanodegree Deep learning at UdacityMaster's degree Machine Learning, Master's degree Machine Learning at African Master's in Machine Intelligence (AMMI)Doctor of Philosophy - PhD Computer Science, Doctor of Philosophy - PhD Computer Science at Leibniz Universität HannoverGraduate Mathematics and Computer Science, Graduate Mathematics and Computer Science at University of LubumbashiMaster's degree Mathematics, Master's degree Mathematics at University of the Western Cape
English, French, Lingala, Swahili
Stackoverflow
569reputation
303kreached
12answers
4questions
Github Skills (15)
jupyter-notebook10
machine-translation10
python10
natural-language-processing9
nlp9
lang8
machine-learning8
uberjar6
fatjar6
google-cloud-platform6
jupyterlab6
executable-jar6
google-app-engine6
google-colaboratory6
gradle6
Programming languages (12)
Github contributions (5)
masakhane-io/masakhane-mt
Oct 2019 - Jun 2021
Machine Translation for Africa
Role in this project:
Full-stack Developer
Full-stack DeveloperContributions:15 commits, 5 PRs, 1 comment in 1 year 8 months
Contributions summary:Salomon contributed to the Masakhane-MT project, which focuses on machine translation for African languages. Their commits involved merging changes and starting the development of the English to Tshiluba language pair, indicated by the creation of a notebook and associated files. The user's work involved setting up the baseline notebook and relevant files for the translation pipeline.
nlpmachine-translationtranslationafrican-languagesnatural-language-processing
Kabongosalomon/AMMI-NLP
Mar 2020 - Apr 2020
Contributions:43 commits, 49 pushes, 1 branch in 1 month
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