// PLAYER 2 HAS ENTERED THE CHAT · SAN DIEGO, CA

Abdulaziz
Khader

ML engineer who ships the whole stack — from enterprise AIOps agents at BMC down to a 360M-parameter LLM answering questions offline on an Arduino.

ROLE: ML / Full-stack Engineer
EDUCATION: UC San Diego — B.S. Computer Engineering '26, math minor · 3.7 GPA
STATUS: OPEN TO NEW-GRAD SWE / ML ROLES
drag the yo-yo. it's real physics. i also do this with an actual one.
BUILD SOME ★ BREAK SOME MORE ★ REPEAT ★ CLOUD TO ARDUINO ★ SHIP IT ★
// EXPERIENCE

Quests cleared.

APR — OCT 2025 · UC SAN DIEGO

System Energy Efficiency Lab Researcher

Optimizing LLMs to run on a new type of DRAM at UCSD's SEELab, working across model sizes from 1B to 7B parameters.

1B — 7B parameter modelsDRAM / LLM optimization
JUN — AUG 2025 · SANTA CLARA, CA

BMC Software Software Engineering Intern

Built a new AIOps tool on the GenAI team folding customers' ServiceNow data into BMC's product line — LangChain/LangGraph CRUD tooling over ServiceNow's REST API, an ASGI server pushing real-time updates, and a semantic model that dynamically parses data configurations. Refactored 1000+ lines into a reusable tool factory that extends to products like Salesforce.

+17% projected revenue+100K expected users60% faster updates
SEP — DEC 2024 · REMOTE

Product Manager Accelerator Software Engineer Intern

Built a full-stack web app integrating reinforcement learning with a scalable database to evaluate players' chess games and surface move patterns and historical trends, wiring frontend workflows to Flask REST APIs, LangChain, and Google Gemini.

−40% retrieval latencySupabase position store
AUG — DEC 2024 · REMOTE

Ocelot AI Studio Fellow

Built a sentiment-conditioned LLM for student mental-health conversations, validated through a 50-sample human evaluation. Optimized a 7B-parameter deployment to run in real time on local hardware, and compressed the training cycle through CUDA optimization across 5,600+ multi-domain samples.

84% tone accuracy (+30% vs GPT-2)4.1/5.0 human eval14 GB → 3.5 GB (4-bit)training 8 h → 30 min
MAY — AUG 2024 · AI & ML FELLOWSHIP

Break Through Tech AI & ML Fellow

Implemented machine learning and neural network models across ensemble regression, computer vision for digit classification, and NLP. Built a Deep Averaging Network for sentiment analysis on 2,000+ book reviews with a TF-IDF vectorizer, then benchmarked it against logistic regression and LSTM models using AUC ROC.

85% testing accuracy2,000+ book reviews
MAY — AUG 2024 · SUMMER RESEARCH

Think Neuro, Inc. Summer Research Intern

Researched how far neurofeedback can enhance physical rehabilitation for patients with weak or no motor function. Extracted 100+ papers from Web of Science and analyzed them in R, producing bibliometric and sentiment graphs, then presented a poster of the findings at the Think Neuro Summer Symposium.

100+ papers analyzed in Rpresented to 1000+ people
SEP 2023 — JUN 2024 · UC SAN DIEGO

UC San Diego Instructional Assistant

Mentored 800+ students through computer systems and software tools — C pointers, dynamic memory allocation, and bitwise operations — tutoring one-on-one, assembling assignments, and proctoring and grading exams.

800+ students mentored1000+ exams graded100% positive feedback
OCT 2023 — MAY 2024 · UC SAN DIEGO

Triton Robocup Mechatronics Engineer

Embedded systems development in C on a 32-bit ARM Cortex-M STM32. Programmed and debugged electronic speed controllers for brushless DC motor control, UART with interrupts for Raspberry Pi data, I2C for IMU reads, and CAN bus for motor commands and encoder feedback. Sensor-fused accelerometer and gyroscope data with a Kalman filter to kill drift.

STM32 / ARM Cortex-MKalman filter sensor fusion
ALSO
Triton XREvents Board DirectorJan — Jun 2026
Headstarter AISoftware Engineering FellowJul — Aug 2024
// FEATURED PROJECTS

The big ones.

RoboRanger
APR — MAY 2026 · ★ BEST EDGE AI + BEST ELEVENLABS · DATAHACKS 2026

RoboRanger

An edge AI wildlife identification robot on an Arduino Uno Q: a MobileNetV3-Large TFLite classifier (75%+ accuracy across 51 species, calibrated with temperature scaling and TTA) paired with a quantized SmolLM2-360M via llama.cpp for fully offline inference. RAG over sqlite-vec with cosine-similarity thresholding gates hallucinations, and a networked mode streams to an ElevenLabs agent for conversational narration. Won against 100+ teams.

PythonC++TFLitellama.cppCODE ↗
GPS IMU Fusion
MAY — JUN 2026 · ★ MERGED INTO THE OFFICIAL DONKEYCAR

GPS IMU Fusion

A 5-state Extended Kalman Filter fusing Adafruit BNO08X IMU data with u-blox C099-F9P GPS to eliminate dead-reckoning drift on a self-driving car. Refactored the vehicle's sensor pipeline into vectorized tuples and built backward-compatibility layers so legacy MPU6050/9250 sensors route into the new EKF without crashing the vehicle loop. Shipped upstream into DonkeyCar, the open-source self-driving platform.

PythonROSKerasEmbeddedVIEW PR ↗
YouPresent
APR 2025 — FEB 2026 · DEMOED AT AWE XR 2025

YouPresent

A Unity VR project for building public-speaking confidence by simulating a conference stage. Google Gemini reads the presenter's gaze and hand motions to generate coaching feedback, an Adobe Mixamo audience applauds at the end, and a recording camera lets you rewatch yourself as your own avatar from the audience's seat.

UnityC#Meta XRGeminiCODE ↗
Open Your Eyes
OCT 2025 — FEB 2026 · ★ PLAYER'S CHOICE · TRITONWARE GAMEJAM

Open Your Eyes

A 2D rogue-like dungeon crawler built in Unity around a vision-loss mechanic, with a storyline about discovering yourself and regaining your sight. Designed multiple levels and enemy types, and showcased it against 30+ teams at the TritonWare GameJam.

UnityC#Game DesignCODE ↗
EARLIER PROJECTS
BLAIR-MMMultimodal recommender — RoBERTa + CLIP ViT dual-encoder, ~6× Recall@10 over TF-IDFcode ↗
Custom Microprocessor8-bit RISC CPU and a custom ISA in SystemVerilog, validated by RTL simulationcode ↗
BTTAI AJL KaggleViT16 fine-tuned on HAM1000 for equitable skin-cancer detection — 12/75 on the leaderboardcode ↗
YouTubeOfflineCLI YouTube downloader — PyTube + MoviePycode ↗
Visual Graph AlgorithmsBFS, SCC and friends in C++, animated step by step in the browsercode ↗
Huffman CodingCompression + encryption in C++ — 25% smaller small filescode ↗
DevJournalLed a team of 12 building a local-first journaling platform with CI/CD and end-to-end testscode ↗
Prediction ModelPublished research at the University of Bologna — K-Means clustering to predict poem authorship in Montale's Diario Postumo, 85% accuracy
// SKILLS

Toolbox.

LANGUAGES
PythonC / C++TypeScriptGoC#JavaSQL
ML SYSTEMS
LangChain / LangGraphPyTorchTensorFlow / KerasCUDAllama.cpp / Ollama / vLLM
WEB & INFRA
React / Next.jsFastAPIDockerGCPMySQL
// OFF HOURS

Not everything is shippable.

OFF HOURS · 01
Reading

Perpetually mid-novel. The queue only grows.

OFF HOURS · 02
Games

Plays them. Builds them. Hence this whole page.

OFF HOURS · 03
Soccer

Weekend fixture. Midfield, mostly honest tackles.

OFF HOURS · 04
Yo-yo

String tricks. You met the physics version up top.

OFF HOURS · 05
Bo staff

Yes, really. Ask for a demo in the interview.

★ Best Edge AI & ElevenLabs — DataHacks 2026★ Player's Choice — TritonWare GameJam★ Demoed at AWE XR 2025★ 800+ students taught
// CONTACT

Let’s talk.

One email gets you an engineer who documents everything, demos on time — and yes, still brings the yo-yo.

akhader@ucsd.edu

© 2026 ABDULAZIZ KHADER · HANDCRAFTED IN SAN DIEGO