Xander McLeod

Hi, I am a software engineer from London 🇬🇧 and Auckland 🇳🇿. I like Ariana Grande, The 1975, Good Coffee, Music, Travelling, & Politics.

Kami

Graduate Software Engineer

July 2025 to Present

Kami is an edtech platform that was founded at the University of Auckland and is actively used by 70 million students.

I worked on the full stack of the main product and a significant number of features and changes I've developed are in production and used by millions of students.

I am most proud of a Machine Learning project on Predictive Text. Before I joined, we used a simple lookup for most similar words by letters to recommend words. However, I used Jax and Flax and a fleet of Google TPUs to train a machine learning model that can use the context of the sentence, phonetic similarity, grammar, and handle extreme typos to recommend the best word possible. It's incredibly strong for disabled students or others who need with their spelling, This was the first machine learning project we worked on as a company and a very good experience for me as an engineer.

If you look at the above screenshot, you can see my machine learning model's suggestions labelled with (llm)

Hihiko

Cofounder

December 2024 to June 2025

After University, I tried my own startup with two friends. We were disappointed that local banks invested our money in petrol and unsustainable products. We tried to create our own neobank.

This was a really fun project. We created our own process to comply with `Know Your Customer` requirements. We used locally hosted machine learning models to OCR a customers driver license, then used a face comparison model to check if the user's front camera had the same face as their ID. We also checked the user could move their face.

We talked to ethical kiwisaver firms and realised we could integrate their kiwisaver and savings products into our app, so users could invest ethically.

We also wanted debit cards. This was going to be very expensive and required large capital reserves. Instead of doing this, I experimented with cryptocurrency. Crypto is usually a scam and has a very bad reputation for good reason, but it does have practical applications. Using Rust and peer to peer libraries, I created a simplified crypto currency using a Directed Acyclic Graph with a Nominated Proof of Stake model. This approach meant we could handle and validate transactions almost instantly and is really good for real life transactions. Blockchain systems like Bitcoin cannot handle most real life transactions because they take roughly an hour to complete, whereas Hiko could validate a transaction in less than a second.

This was a really enjoyable project and I learned a lot, but would require a massive amount of money to actuate this project and make it available to customers.

Partly

Software Engineer Intern

November 2023 to February 2024

clutchstop-web.vercel.app(showcase example)

It's very difficult for fitters to find the right parts. Partly helps with that. I worked on Partly's production platform, improving the experience for customers. I made significant changes to the production rust api, scylla db, and kafka event streaming to add in new data standards and simplify existing ones. I changed the next react frontend for storefront significantly, to be clearer for customers. Received positive feedback from customers and saved them thousands of hours with improved accuracy.

Parkinsons NZ

Tech Lead

July 2024 to November 2024

parky.xandermcleod.com(example)

We consulted for Parkinsons NZ to build a platform for people affected by Parkinsons to track their symptoms and share it with their caretakers and medical professionals. I lead the technology side for a team of six. We built a rust api with mongodb and a remix-react frontend. We presented to the client, received positive feedback, and a paid offer to continue.

Students for Fair Rent

Software Engineer

August 2023 to July 2024

sfr.org.nz

Cofounded a charity for reducing accommodation costs for students. Achieved an overall decrease in rent of $3,000,000 for 2025 alone. Information website, with calculator and game for learning about University of Auckland accommodation. Faciliated thousands of users.