Biography

I build production systems and AI engineering pipelines at Tenex, where we take enterprises from AI-absent to AI-native. We ship features, not slide decks.

Before Tenex, I was a Senior Software Engineer at Whisker Labs, building real-time electrical grid analysis on AWS for IoT fire prevention. Before that I founded Bensa Games, where I worked on Cathexis — a first-person action game in Godot with entity-component architecture and predictive physics.

At Well Incorporated I built event-driven health platform backends handling PII/PHI on AWS Lambda and Kinesis. At Wasatch Photonics I wrote GPU-accelerated spectroscopy pipelines, STM32 and Nordic BLE firmware, and an open-source USB packet library. At IBM I served as a technical advisor for AI and cloud solutions, contributed to IBM System z16 positioning, and co-authored an AI patent submission.

The earliest thread starts with Portal 2 modding, which led me to build the World Portal System for Unity — a commercial asset on the Unity Asset Store featuring seamless portal transitions, physics preservation, multiplayer, and impossible geometry. It's been used by developers worldwide to build games with non-Euclidean spaces.

Across all of this I've worked in game development, computer graphics (GPU/CUDA, Three.js, OpenGL, shaders), AI and machine learning, cloud infrastructure (AWS, Terraform, Redis), embedded systems (STM32, Nordic NRF, BLE), and hardware-adjacent engineering (USB drivers, FPGA, VHDL).

I grew up in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, in an Algerian family — I speak both English and French. I went to Forsyth Country Day School, took courses at Carnegie Mellon in formal mathematics and imperative computation, served as President of UNCG STARS (computer science outreach and diversity in computing), and graduated from NC State with a BS in Computer Science and a Minor in Mathematics.

I was invited to lecture at UNC Chapel Hill on 3D game development and software architecture. I contributed to the NC State Liquid Rocketry Lab. I competed in ICPC.

Outside of engineering, I care about math — ordinary differential equations, set theory, formal mathematics. I think about physics, psychology, and the intersections between them. I play guitar and piano, improvise, and compose in GarageBand. I'm interested in visual design, interactive art, and technology that enables creativity.