Ahmad Pourihosseini

Software Engineer

Instacart

About Me

I’m a Software Engineer with a Master’s in applied computing from the University of Toronto and a wealth of diverse experiences throughout my roles at software and machine learning startups, machine learning research labs in academia and industry, and my current role at a growing software company. I love writing software that makes people’s lives easier and more productive, so I’m always on the lookout for opportunities to innovate and improve processes. When I’m not writing code for work, I’m either working on my side projects, reading, or skilling up in video games! Feel free to reach out if you have an idea for a project you think I’d be interested in!

Interests

Software Engineering
Web development
Machine Learning

Education

MSc in Applied Computing, 2021 - 2023
University of Toronto
BSc in Computer Software Engineering, 2015 - 2020
University of Tehran

Experience

Software Engineer

BlueCat

Mar 2023 – Present Toronto, ON, Canada

Implementing new features and improving the core software product. After noticing an opportunity to enhance a workflow used by all developers, I took the initiative to pitch my solution to management, then plan and implement it in just three weeks. The solution, which required learning a new programming language and a new build system, has earned positive feedback from various levels of the organization.

Machine Learning Intern

Samsung AI Centre - Toronto

May 2022 – Dec 2022 Toronto, ON, Canada

Improved the performance of the state-of-the-art fine-grained dependency parser in the cooking domain, in a collaborative effort that resulted in a 7.8 edge prediction F1 score increase, using HuggingFace and AllenNLP.

Teaching Assistant

University of Toronto

Sep 2021 – Apr 2022 Toronto, ON, Canada

TAed for the course: Programming on the Web. This role included hands-on lab sessions, meeting with students to discuss projects, and grading assignments.

Research Assistant

Data Analytics Lab at the University of Tehran

Jun 2020 – Aug 2021 Tehran, Iran

Worked on the application of pointer networks on a combinatorial optimization problem on graphs using PyTorch and NetworkX.

Machine Learning Intern

Sensifai

Jun 2019 – Aug 2019 Tehran, Iran

I worked on setting up an object detection/classification pipeline on a Coral Dev Board. I learned a great deal about running machine learning models in resource-constrained settings and the methods used to address the challenges involved, such as model quantization. I worked mainly with TensorFlow Lite and open-source implementations of popular model architectures.

Research Assistant

Machine Learning and Computational Modeling Lab at the University of Tehran

Feb 2019 – Feb 2020 Tehran, Iran

I worked with a graduate student on a method to increase the diversity of the adversarial perturbations generated by a specific adversarial generator, in order to increase the robustness of adversarial defense modules that are trained using those perturbations. This research was also the subject of my bachelor’s thesis, under the supervision of Dr.Araabi.

Backend Developer

Boghche

Jun 2017 – Aug 2017 Tehran, Iran

I developed a Telegram bot, which would provide another way for customers to access the company’s services in addition to its Android & ios applications. People would have access to all of the essential functionality of the Android & ios applications, but it would have the advantage of no installation requirement, platform independence, and ease of use for customers with less technical understanding. This internship taught me a great deal about web development, especially back-end web development, Node.js, and MongoDB.