Hi, I'm Umar 👋

This is my first personal website running on ~~an NVIDIA H100~~ Cloudflare Workers :)

I'm currently a software engineer at Ramp working on compute, CI/CD, networking & observability.

Highlights include:

Managing all monorepo "service" deploys to production in 8 minutes or less via AWS ECS Fargate.
Keeping track of Ramp's MoM service reliability across 400+ services for SLIs → SLOs → contract SLAs (four & half 9s and < 2 sec p99 latency).
Managing isolated, pre-deployment production infrastructure in Buildkite with cryptographically signed builds, enforcing artifact provenance across database migrations, agent registration, and other deployment-critical steps.

Research Interests

I'm interested in the intersection of systems, networking, security, and privacy. In particular, I'm drawn to problems where strong cryptographic or privacy guarantees have to coexist with the performance and operational constraints of real-world systems. My academic learnings has included secure multi-party computation, private computation, high performance networking, multicore systems, and concurrent systems.

In Progress

What I'm hacking on

I'm experimenting with a lightweight and isolated TCP/IP stack implementation for the seL4 kernel on AArch64 (and later Apple Silicon hardware) to take advantage of my home's 10 Gbps fiber. Still early; currently working through the architecture and first prototype.

Education

University of Waterloo

Grade: 85% cumulative GPA over 5 years of study.

Jan. 2023 – Dec. 2025

Bachelor of Computer Science

Sept. 2020 – Dec. 2022

Bachelor of Software Engineering

Notable Graduate Coursework

CS 856 — High Performance Networking
Dr. Mina Arashloo · No grade because I left halfway to join Ramp as FTE. NA.
CS 858 — Advanced Topics in Cryptography, Security & Privacy
Computation over Encrypted Data · Dr. Mohammad Hajiabadi · Scribe Notes 90%
CS 798 — Privacy in Computation
Dr. Ian Goldberg 97%
CS 798 — Multicore Programming in C++
Dr. Trevor Brown · 6th highest final grade in class of 30. How fast can you make a concurrent hashtable on modern hardware with NUMA? 97%

Notable Undergraduate Coursework

CS 456 — Networks 100%
CS 458 — Security 88%
CS 365 — Complexity Theory CR
CS 343 — Concurrency 86%
CS 489 — Special Topics 86%
CS 453 — Linux Security 97%
MSCI 541 — Search Engines 80%
CS 370 — Numerical Computation 80%