Syed Jafri
Hardware & Software Engineer
Building at the boundary of silicon & software
Roles across engineering, product, research, and sales.
Turing · Contract
San Francisco, California, United States
Support the training and evaluation of AI models, crafting and reviewing data that improves model reasoning and response quality.
Full-time · 1 yr 4 mos
New York, New York, United States
Nov 2026 – Present · 1 mo
• Lead a five-person software engineering team, driving the product from development toward launch.
• Defined architecture and code-quality standards while staying hands-on in the codebase; primary technical contact for stakeholders.
• Ran sprint planning, code reviews and CI/CD practices to keep releases predictable and the codebase maintainable.
Aug 2025 – Nov 2026 · 1 yr 4 mos
Theorem Institute
Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States
Mapping unseen mechanics in a private algorithmic sanctuary. My prose bridges abstract theory with digital architecture, anchoring the hidden architecture of our research in quiet precision.
Researcher · Contributor · Editor
+ ML theory: Zipf's Law All the Way Down: Deriving Neural Scaling Laws from Data Distribution Structure
+ Algorithms: Subquadratic Attention with Provable Approximation Guarantees
+ Systems: SLO-Aware LLM Serving with Disaggregated Prefill and Adaptive KV-Cache Management
Corebyte · Contract
Seattle, Washington, United States
• Built AI and data pipelines on contract, covering data ingestion, transformation and LLM-powered features for production use.
• Designed data models and validation checks to keep training and analytics data clean, versioned and reproducible.
Degrees and programs, current and completed.
University of Washington
Graduate studies in electrical and computer engineering, with advanced coursework in embedded systems, signal processing, and computer architecture.
Illinois Institute of Technology
Concurrent w/ B.A. • CGPA: 4.0/4.0
+ Developing hands-on expertise in cloud architecture, database administration, and enterprise IT infrastructure management.
+ Learning to design, deploy, and secure modern systems and networking solutions for scalable business environments.
+ Gaining practical knowledge in data engineering, network security protocols, and system optimization.
University of Washington
Activities and societies: DubHacks, etc.
Inglemoor High School
Built a broad academic foundation across the sciences, humanities, and arts.
Software & hardware work across industries, shipped and in-progress.
EnterpriseSoftware
CLI tool and dashboard for managing multi-environment deployments with automated rollback, health checks, and Slack integration.
EnterpriseSoftware
Lightweight WASM-compiled neural network runtime that runs quantized models in-browser with zero server dependency.
EnterpriseSoftware
Opinionated Go framework for building observable microservices with tracing, circuit-breaking, and gRPC/REST dual-mode routing.
EnterpriseSoftware
Real-time infra dashboard with sub-second latency, WebSocket streaming, time-series aggregation, and anomaly alerts.
SalesSoftware
Weighted forecast modeling built on historical win rates and stage velocity, with scenario what-ifs and rep-level roll-ups.
SalesSoftware
Event-driven enrichment service handling identity resolution, fuzzy dedupe, and bidirectional CRM sync with conflict reconciliation.
SalesSoftware
Multichannel sequencing engine with deliverability guardrails, reply detection, and automatic pause when a meeting is booked.
SalesSoftware
Transcribes discovery calls, scores them against a qualification framework, and writes structured notes and next steps back to the CRM.
SalesSoftware
CPQ flow with tiered pricing rules, discount approval chains, and templated proposal generation handed off to e-signature.
CreativeSoftware
Parametric design tool that produces seeded, reproducible layouts from a grammar of grids, palettes, and type scales. Exports print-ready SVG and PDF.
CreativeSoftware
WebGL visualizer driven by live FFT analysis, with preset morphing, MIDI controller bindings, and hot-reloading GLSL editing.
CreativeSoftware
Keyframe editor with editable bezier easing curves, onion-skinning, and export to Lottie JSON or raw CSS keyframe animations.
CreativeSoftware
Node-graph texture generator with GPU-accelerated live preview and one-click PBR map export for albedo, normal, roughness, and AO.
CreativeSoftware
Specimen tool for auditing variable axes, kerning pairs, and OpenType feature coverage across arbitrary sample text and weights.
CreativeHardware
Real-time HDMI video pipeline on Spartan-7 implementing edge detection and LUT-based color grading at 1080p60.
GameSoftware
Turn-based roguelike with wave-function-collapse level generation, fully deterministic seeds, and a data-driven ability system.
GameSoftware
Custom entity-component-system engine with a job-based scheduler, hot-reloadable gameplay modules, and a Vulkan forward+ renderer.
GameSoftware
Deterministic lockstep networking with rollback, client-side prediction, and lag compensation for 2–8 player matches.
GameSoftware
2D platformer built on a custom verlet soft-body solver, with full gamepad support, Steam achievements, and 40 hand-authored levels.
GameSoftware
Visual editor for authoring behavior trees and utility AI, with live in-engine debugging, blackboard inspection, and an Unreal runtime.
IndustrialHardware
4-layer PCB with USB-C PD negotiation, CAN bus interface, and isolated analog front-end for industrial sensor logging.
IndustrialHardware
Battery-powered sensor node with LoRaWAN uplink, e-ink display, and MQTT bridge. 6-month battery life on AAA cells.
SalesSoftware
Pipeline analytics platform that unifies CRM and billing data to surface forecast accuracy, deal risk, and revenue trends.
IndustrialSoftware
Map tile server that slices large raster and vector datasets into web-ready tiles for fast, zoomable map rendering.
IndustrialSoftware
Satellite land-surface-temperature analysis mapping urban heat islands against neighborhood demographics to flag inequitable exposure.
IndustrialSoftware
Risk model for the wildland–urban interface combining fuels, terrain, and structure density to score wildfire exposure.
IndustrialSoftware
Crop-health mapping from multispectral imagery using NDVI and related vegetation indices across field boundaries.
IndustrialSoftware
Multi-date imagery comparison that detects emerging crop stress zones and tracks how they change through the season.
IndustrialSoftware
Crop-health pipeline that flags early signs of plant disease from imagery before symptoms spread across the field.
IndustrialSoftware
Weed mapping for precision agriculture that generates spot-spray prescriptions to cut herbicide and input use.
EnterpriseSoftware
Public dataset ingested and modeled with dbt, published as an interactive dashboard with a findings report.
EnterpriseSoftware
HNSW vector index built in Go/Rust and benchmarked against FAISS for recall and query latency.
EnterpriseSoftware
Change data capture from Postgres via Debezium and Kafka, streamed into a warehouse.
IndustrialHardware
Matrix-multiply/CNN layer accelerator in Verilog, benchmarked against a CPU; extends the FPGA video core.
EnterpriseSoftware
GPT-style model in plain PyTorch trained on a small corpus, with attention visualizations.
EnterpriseSoftware
Tiny automatic-differentiation library in C++/Rust with an MLP trained on MNIST.
IndustrialSoftware
Detects land-use changes between satellite images over time, served through the Geospatial Tile Server.
SalesSoftware
Agentic upgrade to the Call Intelligence Summarizer.
Papers, articles, and talks on embedded systems & silicon–software co-design.
Paper
Derives power-law neural scaling behaviour from the heavy-tailed, Zipfian structure of natural data, linking loss curves over model size, data and compute to the frequency distribution of the features a model must learn.
Paper
Presents an attention mechanism that runs in subquadratic time in sequence length while provably bounding its approximation error against exact softmax attention.
Paper
A serving system that splits prefill and decode onto separate resources and adapts KV-cache allocation at runtime to meet latency SLOs while maximising throughput for large language models.
Paper
Explores how computational complexity of boundary quantum states encodes bulk geometry in holographic dualities, connecting circuit complexity, tensor networks, and the growth of spacetime volume.
Paper
Surveys topological invariants and edge states in open, non-Hermitian systems, including exceptional points, the non-Hermitian skin effect, and how bulk–boundary correspondence breaks down and is restored.
Paper
Bridges symmetry-aware neural architectures on graphs and manifolds with persistent homology, using topological summaries as features and inductive biases for learning on structured data.
Paper
A runtime scheduler that dynamically migrates workloads between big and little cores, reducing peak power by 34% while meeting hard real-time deadlines on heterogeneous SoCs.
Paper
Evaluates WASM as a sandboxed execution environment for untrusted firmware modules on Cortex-M, achieving memory isolation with under 8% overhead and no MMU requirement.
Paper
A quantized autoencoder deployed on STM32H7 detects anomalous CAN frames at 1 Mbps with 97.3% detection rate. Model fits in 14 KB flash and 6 KB RAM.
Article
A practical deep-dive into controlled-impedance routing, differential pair tuning, and via stub mitigation for PCB designs operating above 1 GHz.
Talk
A conference talk covering the full journey of adopting Rust for bare-metal firmware — toolchain, async embassy runtime, peripheral drivers, and C HAL interop. Live demo on a custom STM32 board.
Article
Demonstrates how an incorrect RTOS tick rate causes hidden scheduling latency spikes and unnecessary wakeup energy. Presents a decision framework that reduces tick-induced idle energy by 42–91%.
Paper
A network slicing framework for LoRaWAN that allocates spreading factors and channels to heterogeneous device classes, improving capacity by 2.4× under industrial interference. Validated on a 120-node testbed.
Paper
Replaces worst-case execution time with a full probability measure over execution demand, then derives a closed-form deadline-miss bound via Chernoff concentration on the cumulative demand process. Tightens classical utilization tests by 11–19% without sacrificing soundness.
Paper
Models quantization error intervals as an abstract domain linked to concrete real-valued semantics by a Galois connection, giving sound static bounds on accumulated rounding error through cascaded biquad filters. Bounds are proven optimal for monotone pipelines.
Paper
Formulates task-to-tile placement as a normalized cut on the communication graph and solves the Fiedler-vector relaxation instead of the NP-hard integer program. Achieves a provable approximation ratio on planar meshes and cuts average hop count by 27%.
Paper
Casts nested interrupt arrival and service as a linear system over the max-plus semiring, so end-to-end latency becomes an eigenvalue problem. The cycle-time eigenvalue yields tight worst-case bounds validated against cycle-accurate Cortex-M7 traces with under 3% pessimism.
Paper
Derives achievable rate regions for LoRa-style CSS modulation with non-orthogonal spreading factors, treating collisions as a multiple-access channel with partial interference cancellation. The capacity envelope explains the empirical throughput ceiling in dense LPWAN deployments.
Paper
Bounds the spectral norm of each layer to certify that post-training int8 quantization shifts reconstruction error by no more than a computable constant, giving a false-negative guarantee for on-device detectors over the training distribution's convex hull.
Article
Argues that taking a maximum over observed runs estimates the wrong quantity, and shows what extreme value theory actually promises — along with what it quietly assumes about independence and tail regularity in real firmware.
Talk
A working introduction to the algebra behind static analysis tooling — partial orders, ascending chain conditions, and Kleene iteration — built from a live dataflow analysis of a bare-metal driver rather than textbook examples.
Licenses, credentials, and recognitions.
University of Washington · MLH Hackathon
Udemy · Alex Genadinik
Udemy · Ed Donner, Ligency
Apple
Amazon Developer · Hackathon
University of Washington × IBM · Hackathon
SAP & Coursera
Udemy
OpenCV × AWS · Hackathon
Degree
University of Washington
Degree
University of Washington
Degree
Illinois Institute of Technology
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
freeCodeCamp
Udemy
Udemy
Stanford University School of Engineering
Carnegie Mellon University
Udacity
Udacity
Udacity
Udacity
Udacity
Udacity
Udacity
Udacity
Udacity
Udacity
MIT xPRO
MIT xPRO
MIT xPRO
Udemy
Udemy
Udemy
Amazon Web Services · Coursera
Google Cloud · Coursera
Akamai · Coursera
IBM · Coursera
Google · Coursera
Stanford Online & DeepLearning.AI · Coursera
IBM · Coursera
IBM · Coursera
Google · Coursera
IBM · Coursera
Imperial College London · Coursera
University of Minnesota · Coursera
L&T EduTech · Coursera
IBM · Coursera
Coursera
Microsoft · Coursera
IBM SkillUp · Coursera
UC Davis · Coursera
Wharton, University of Pennsylvania · Coursera
University of Michigan · Coursera
University of Colorado Boulder · Coursera
University of Colorado Boulder · Coursera
University of Colorado Boulder · Coursera
Yale University · Coursera
ISAE-SUPAERO · Coursera
Stanford Online · Coursera
Sage Publications · Coursera
Packt · Coursera
Coursera
ADP · Coursera
SkillUp · Coursera
Northeastern University · Coursera
Coursera
Coursera
EDUCBA · Coursera
Microsoft · Coursera
MathWorks · Coursera
Google · Coursera
Oracle · Coursera
IBM · Coursera
IBM · Coursera
Coursera
Coursera
University of Toronto · Coursera
IBM · Coursera
Edureka · Coursera
Coursera
Coursera
Google Cloud · Coursera
Amazon Web Services · Coursera
IBM · Coursera
Meta · Coursera
I'm an engineer who doesn't believe in the hardware/software divide. The most interesting problems live at the boundary — where firmware talks to silicon, where network packets become physical actions, where sensors transform the world into data.
My background spans embedded systems design, PCB layout, and low-level firmware, all the way through backend services and modern web frontends. I've shipped products that run for years on coin cells and built systems handling millions of API requests per day.
When I'm not building, I'm reading IEEE papers, contributing to open-source tooling, or tinkering with something that has no good reason to exist — yet.
Languages
Hardware
Infrastructure
Protocols