Harris Ahmad
he/him · Buffalo, NY
I build transactional systems for distributed databases and microservices, and ship developer tools people install.
CS PhD student at the University at Buffalo, advised by Dr. Haonan Lu. Before that I shipped production backends at Linq.io, Its IT Group and LUMS.
Now: a transaction reordering layer for existing strictly serializable concurrency control, a transaction protocol for microservices, and shipping BlastRadius.
Open to software engineering and research internships · Summer 2027. Returning afterwards to the PhD (expected May 2028).
Results at a glance
- up to 75%lower tail latency, and 85% fewer abortssrc · transaction reordering layer, in preparation for USENIX OSDI 2027
- 39/39recall, 0 false positivessrc · BlastRadius eval, planted 6-repo corpus
- 5s → 500msAPI latency for 20K+ daily active userssrc · Awaaz-e-Sehat, LUMS
- 838PyPI installssrc · BlastRadius 336 + deadpush 502
Selected work
All projects- 01Aug 2026 – present
BlastRadius
MCP server · Claude Code pluginCross-repo dependency memory for coding agents: it tells an agent which other repos break before it bumps a shared Docker image, Terraform module, GitHub Action, Helm chart, npm package or Python package.
Result39/39 recall · 0 false positives · 376 tests
pip install blastradius-mcp# sample output[CRITICAL] vitest CVE-2026-47429 - 02Jan 2025 – present
Transaction reordering layer
Research · GoA transaction reordering layer that lowers the tail latency and aborts of a system’s existing strictly serializable concurrency control, without changing its code.
Resultup to 75% lower tail latency · up to 85% fewer aborts2PL, OCC, NCC · CloudLab
In preparation for USENIX OSDI 2027No public link yet - 03Jun 2026 – present
deadpush
Guardian daemon · 22 MCP toolsStops an AI coding agent from destroying your work: before a destructive git command runs in its sandbox, it takes a validated save point, then blocks the command.
# ablation- block rate
- 0.33 → 0.67
- work preserved
- 0.92 → 1.00
0 false positives (48 runs) - 04WWW ’24
Hidden data costs of YouTube ads
Paper + public datasetFirst independent empirical study of mobile YouTube ad data costs, from the user’s side.
Data17.6K videos · 46.6K ads · 8 countries
~3× higher latent buffer loss at 720p
Research
PublicationsIn sharded, strictly serializable databases, concurrency control aborts or blocks conflicting transactions under contention, and tail latency climbs. Across microservices that each keep their own, possibly different, database, making one request’s updates serializable and all-or-nothing usually means two-phase commit, which every database must support and which holds locks until the global commit, or sagas, which give up isolation.
- 01
Transaction reordering layer
OSDI 2027 · in preparationGo. Lowers the tail latency and aborts of existing strictly serializable concurrency control without changing its code: up to 75% lower tail latency and 85% fewer aborts across 2PL, OCC and NCC on CloudLab.
- 02
Transaction protocol for microservices
OSDI 2027 · in preparationGo and Java. Aims to make transactions across microservices that each keep their own, possibly different, database serializable and all-or-nothing, without requiring XA support and without the row locks Apache Seata’s AT and XA modes hold until the global commit.
- 03
Protocol prototypes
Go · CloudLabPrimary-backup, chain replication and distributed two-phase locking.
Both 01 and 02 are in preparation for USENIX OSDI 2027, with support from NSF-funded projects at UB.
Publication
Emaan Atique*, Saad Sher Alam*, Harris Ahmad, Ihsan Ayyub Qazi, Zafar Ayyub Qazi. “Uncovering the Hidden Data Costs of Mobile YouTube Video Ads.” The ACM Web Conference 2024 (WWW ’24), Singapore. *co-primary authors
TA, Modern Networking Concepts at UB; Object Oriented Design in C++ and Distributed Systems at LUMS.
Experience
Full history- Jan 2025 – present
Research Software Engineer · University at Buffalo
Transactional support for distributed databases and microservices, in Go and Java.
- Jul – Dec 2024
Software Engineer · Linq.io, Dallas (remote)
On-demand media API cut page load 60% across 10K+ item inventories; enterprise OAuth 2.0 SSO.
- May – Dec 2024
System Engineer · Its IT Group (contract, remote)
Real-time WebSocket backend for an AR app with 5K+ daily active users; LiDAR → Unity pipeline cut manual measurement time 80%.
- Oct 2023 – Mar 2024
Software Engineer · Interactive Media Lab, LUMS
Awaaz-e-Sehat: API latency 5s → 500ms; Whisper + GPT-4 clinical notes at 95% accuracy.
- May 2022 – Dec 2023
Research Software Engineer · Network and Systems Group, LUMS
Built the WWW ’24 dataset and toolchain.
- PhD, Computer Science, University at Buffalo2025 – 2028 (expected)
- BS, Computer Science, LUMS2020 – 2024
- YC AI Startup School, selected from 30,000 applications2026
News
Released BlastRadius on PyPI
Wrote up deadpush, guardrails for AI coding agents
Selected for Y Combinator AI Startup School
Started my PhD at the University at Buffalo