Work Experience

Selected Programs

Participant
Y Combinator AI Startup School — San Francisco, CA
July 2026

• Selected for YC’s AI Startup School 2026 at Chase Center from a pool of ~30,000 applicants — a multi-day program for builders working on AI products and research.
• Joined office hours and 1:1 conversations with founders and operators about what we’re building; networked with peers across AI systems, products, and research.

Professional Experience

Graduate Researcher
University at Buffalo (SUNY) - Buffalo, NY
January 2025 to Present

• Building a distributed transaction reordering and coordination layer on production-grade systems (FoundationDB, CockroachDB) in Go that reduces aborts, lock contention, and tail latency; work submitted to ACM SOSP 2026.
• Prototyped primary-backup, chain replication, and distributed two-phase locking in Go to stress-test protocol behavior for collaborative AI workloads on CloudLab (NSF-supported).

Software Engineer
Linq.io - Dallas, TX (Remote)
July 2024 to December 2024

• Shipped an on-demand media-generation API (FastAPI, MongoDB) that cut page load by 60% by generating asset thumbnails as users browsed 10K+ inventories.
• Integrated OAuth 2.0 SSO for enterprise accounts so customers could sign in with existing corporate credentials.
• Built admin debugging and playground dashboards that exposed system metrics via OS calls, reducing troubleshooting time for 50+ support tickets.

System Engineer
Its IT Group - Lahore, PK
May 2024 to August 2024

• Redesigned the Node.js / MongoDB backend of an AR app for VTuber/karaoke 3D avatars with WebSockets for real-time comments, notifications, and likes across 5K+ daily active users.
• Implemented a 3D model pipeline for LiDAR scans (USDZ → GLB) enabling Unity integration and cutting manual measurement time by 80%.

Software Engineer
Interactive Media Lab, LUMS - Lahore, PK
October 2023 to March 2024

• Built Awaaz-e-Sehat, an e-health platform on Flask and AWS Lambda, improving API latency from 5s → 500ms for high daily query volume.
• Ran a serverless ingest and search stack (Lambda, DynamoDB, S3) over 50K+ clinical recordings with automatic scaling.
• Productionized Whisper + GPT-4 transcription into structured clinical notes (95% accuracy, 1K+ recordings/day).

Research Experience

Undergraduate Researcher
Networks and Systems Group, LUMS - Lahore, PK
May 2022 to December 2023

• Measured how YouTube main-video bitrate drives buffer loss across resolutions (720p ~3× higher latent buffer loss than 360p; 10.1 MB vs 3.4 MB).
• Released a public dataset and toolchain covering 17.6K videos and 46.6K ads across 8 countries (15+ features/video, including per-video buffer telemetry).
• Published at ACM The Web Conference 2024 (WWW ‘24): doi:10.1145/3589334.3645496.
• Built a distributed scraper (Selenium/PyTube) parallelized across ~20 machines, gathering 2TB+ of performance data over a year.

Teaching Experience

Teaching Assistant
University at Buffalo - Buffalo, NY
Spring 2025

• Modern Networking Concepts (CSE 489/589)

Teaching Assistant
Lahore University of Management Sciences - Lahore, PK
Spring 2023, Fall 2023

• CS200: Object Oriented Programming in C++ (Spring’23, Fall’23)
• CS582: Distributed Systems (Fall’23)

Earlier Experience

Backend / frontend coursework projects & short roles at LUMS (2022–2023) — P2P file sharing with DHTs, speech-therapy MERN app (Guftaar), and a short course-website engagement for an Internet Architecture workshop.

Machine Learning Developer (freelance), Fiverr (2021) — dataset cleaning, model comparison, and end-to-end ML pipelines for client projects.