Associate Software Engineer at AsteraKarachi, PK

Sunny Shaban Ali.

Software engineer. Builds agentic AI systems, industrial IoT, and the tooling around them.

CS graduate from FAST-NUCES Karachi (CGPA 3.75), currently shipping at Astera Software as an Associate Software Engineer. I build full-stack systems across MERN/PERN, Spring Boot, and Rust, plus the AI/ML products that ride on top.

Lately: co-architecting agentic AI pipelines for UI regression, engineering long-term memory for enterprise AI agents, wiring MCP server connectivity into enterprise studios, and load-testing SignalR services at 100K+ requests. Previously: replaced legacy SAP/vendor systems at Dawlance for €60K in savings, and led real-time IoT analytics on factory floors.

On the side: Microsoft Azure DB Emerald Contributor (15+ resolved issues), Postman Student Leader, MongoDB SME, ACM Frontend Head, and 1st Runner-Up at HackOps'25.

Full-stackAgentic AIIndustrial IoTRustOpen source
Keep reading
5

Engineering roles

Astera (2), 10Pearls, Dawlance, MazikGlobal

€60K

Saved per year

Dawlance factory analytics

2.5K+

Users served

Coders Cup registration portal

2

IEEE papers accepted

IBCAST 2026, sole and first author

Experience.

From AI intern to Associate SWE in a year: agentic pipelines, full-stack APIs, factory-floor IoT, computer vision.

  1. Jul 2026 – Present

    Karachi, PK

    Current

    Astera Software

    Associate Software Engineer

    • Co-architected an agentic AI pipeline for Centerprise WPF UI regression with a 5-engineer team, automating end-to-end test generation and validation across 60+ wizards; eliminated manual QA, now the default gate on every Centerprise build.
    • Engineered long-term memory for Centerprise AI agents: three-layer (facts, scenarios, persona) system with background LLM fact extraction, similarity-based dedup, and hybrid pgvector + full-text retrieval; injects per-turn user context at ~20ms.
    • Introduced external MCP server connectivity in Centerprise and Astera Studio, persisting credentials via vault at user and tenant scope with project-level binding; eliminated per-project re-auth and powered the downstream SignalR agent service.
    • Built a Teams meeting-scheduling AI agent on Microsoft Graph APIs with AI skills for calendar, roster, and availability; offloaded timezone, conflict, and name-parsing to deterministic Python, keeping LLMs out of scheduling decisions.
    • Resolved 126 bugs in a company-wide sprint, including one root-cause fix that ended multiple recurring failures in Centerprise's critical job scheduler.
    Agentic AIMCPpgvectorSignalRMicrosoft Graph
  2. Mar 2026 – Jun 2026

    Karachi, PK

    Astera Software

    Trainee Software Engineer

    • Designed and built a Playwright UI regression suite for Astera Studio Web, covering 470 test cases across 8 functional areas with parallel execution and auto-retry; reported 30 new bugs and cut post-deploy smoke testing from hours to minutes.
    • Benchmarked 4 load-testing strategies for the SignalR agent service and selected k6, authoring a custom xk6-signalr extension in Go with a JWT/CSV harness; mapped the safe-throughput envelope and cleared the service for production.
    Playwrightk6GoSignalRLoad testing
  3. Dec 2025 – Feb 2026

    Karachi, PK

    10Pearls

    Java Full-Stack Intern

    • Developed a full-stack Java contact management app: Spring Boot REST APIs with PostgreSQL and JPA behind a React frontend; integrated SonarQube quality gates and cut response times 40% through query optimization and caching.
    Spring BootPostgreSQLJPAReactSonarQube
  4. Jul 2025 – Aug 2025

    Karachi, PK

    Top Intern · Golden Key

    Dawlance · Subsidiary of Arçelik Türkiye

    SWE Intern

    • Built a real-time factory analytics platform (MERN + TypeScript) that replaced legacy SAP and vendor systems, streaming live PLC signals from shop-floor machines over WebSockets via Raspberry Pi (Rust, S7 protocol).
    • Delivered €60K in annual savings through automated breakdown detection, real-time alerting, and OEE/MTTR/MTBF dashboards (Redis, MongoDB aggregations) across 4 machines; named Top Intern and awarded the Golden Key.
    RustAxumReactTypeScriptSocket.IOIndustrial IoT
  5. Jun 2025 – Jul 2025

    Karachi, PK

    MazikGlobal Pakistan

    AI Intern

    • Built an AI fitness platform around a modular LangChain tool-calling agent (mood tracking, RAG-based Q&A, report generation, profile updates) with CNN-based real-time posture detection in TensorFlow at 94% accuracy.
    • Shipped video-based workout-plan generation via FastAPI with a React progress dashboard; evolving MongoDB user summaries cut chatbot latency on repeat interactions.
    LangChainFastAPITensorFlowRAGReactMongoDB

Projects.

Research, hackathon wins, shipped apps, and upstream open-source work. Most recent first.

Scribe: Open-Source · Collaborative LaTeX Editor

Open-Source · Collaborative LaTeX Editor

Scribe

Self-hostable Overleaf alternative where one Rust (Axum) binary runs the whole API: REST routes, a Yjs CRDT hub for multi-cursor editing, a Redis-backed compile queue, and an AI proxy wired for OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, Ollama, LM Studio, or any OpenAI-compatible endpoint. Collaborators get WebRTC voice chat right in the editor. The Tauri 2 desktop bundles the Tectonic engine and mirrors projects to SQLite, so a clean Windows machine compiles a paper on first launch and offline edits sync back through three-way conflict resolution. Ships as signed MSI/NSIS installers, licensed AGPL-3.0.

RustTauriReactYjs CRDTSelf-HostedMay 2026 - Present
Agentic Multi-Modal Triage of Citizen Flood Reports at Scale: Final Year Project · R&D

Final Year Project · R&D

Agentic Multi-Modal Triage of Citizen Flood Reports at Scale

Constructed and released the Close-View Flood Dataset (CVFD) on Kaggle: 7,855 images with pixel-wise semantic segmentation masks across 3 operationally motivated rescue classes, with inter-annotator agreement of Cohen's κ = 0.81. Benchmarked 7 vision architectures on CVFD and identified fine-tuned DINOv3 as optimal at 98.84% accuracy (±0.08) with 21.6M parameters, matching Swin Transformer at one-quarter the parameter count. Built an agentic triage pipeline fusing a CV Agent (DINOv3 + SAM 3) with a zero-shot multilingual LM Agent into a composite priority scorer, validated via Spearman's ρ and Cohen's κ.

Computer VisionDINOv3SAM 3Agentic AIDatasetSep 2025 - Mar 2026
LineSentry: Industrial IoT · Dawlance

Industrial IoT · Dawlance

LineSentry

Real-time OEE / MTTR / MTBF analytics platform, a vendor-neutral replacement for costly legacy industrial monitoring (€60K saved), live on 4 machines at Dawlance and designed to scale to hundreds across multiple PLCs. Per-PLC Tokio daemons on Raspberry Pi read Siemens S7 bytes via snap7-rs and POST hex frames to a Rust (Axum) backend that decodes Q{byte}.{bit} pins through a multi-PLC registry, runs a 4-state machine, and persists to MongoDB with timezone bucketed aggregations. React 18 dashboards stream over Socket.IO with Recharts, guided machine setup, and SAP-linked stoppage classification; secured with JWT, reCAPTCHA, and RBAC; shipped via Docker Compose.

RustAxumReactPLCRaspberry PiReal-timeJul 2025 - Aug 2025
Trainiac: Agentic AI Fitness · MazikGlobal

Agentic AI Fitness · MazikGlobal

Trainiac

AI fitness platform anchored by a modular LangChain tool-calling agent (mood tracking, RAG-based Q&A, report generation, profile updates) with CNN-based real-time posture detection in TensorFlow at 94% accuracy. Video-based workout-plan generation via FastAPI and a React progress dashboard; MongoDB-stored evolving user summaries cut chatbot response latency on repeat interactions.

LangChainFastAPITensorFlowRAGReactJun 2025 - Jul 2025
Jild · AI Skincare Analysis: HackOps'25 · 1st Runner-Up

HackOps'25 · 1st Runner-Up

Jild · AI Skincare Analysis

1st Runner-Up at HackOps'25 for an AI skincare analyzer detecting acne and dark circles at 83.8% mAP@50 on a ~2k-image dataset, returning severity scores and matched product/routine recommendations. React + Tailwind + MUI frontend on Vercel with a Dockerized Flask inference service and Supabase, IaC via Terraform; GitHub Actions CI/CD with SonarCloud, GitGuardian, and Dependabot held critical vulnerabilities at zero through release.

YOLOFlaskDockerTerraformCI/CDReactApr 2025
Hyprland Starter: Open-Source · 880+ ★

Open-Source · 880+ ★

Hyprland Starter

Contributed an open-source screenshot tool to ML4W Hyprland Starter, a popular Arch Linux desktop project (880+ GitHub stars); supports region, fullscreen, interactive, clipboard, and color-picker capture, all triggered via Print Screen shortcuts. Merged 8 keyboard shortcuts (volume, brightness, mute, microphone, WiFi, screen refresh) and a lockscreen display fix for 1920×1080 monitors, across 2 pull requests upstream.

LinuxHyprlandShellArchJan 2025
Coders Cup Registration Portal: PERN · 2.5K+ users

PERN · 2.5K+ users

Coders Cup Registration Portal

Built the Coders Cup contest portal in React + Tailwind on Azure Web App with multi-field client validation and Google reCAPTCHA v2, handling 2,500+ users and 900+ team registrations for ACM NUCES. Ranked top-3 on Google for "Coders Cup" keywords with 9,900 page views; shipped via GitHub Actions CI/CD and awarded Special Mention for leading platform development.

ReactNode.jsPostgreSQLAzureCI/CDNov 2024
Automated Invoice Processor: Python · OCR

Python · OCR

Automated Invoice Processor

AI-powered OCR tool using Python, PyTesseract, Matplotlib, and PyQt5 to parse 100+ invoice formats at 93% accuracy, reducing manual processing time by 40% through automated extraction and validation.

PythonPyTesseractOCRDec 2023
AlgoViz: Interactive Algorithm Visualizer · 27 Algorithms

Interactive Algorithm Visualizer · 27 Algorithms

AlgoViz

Interactive visualizer for 27 classic algorithms across sorting, searching, geometry, math — and quantum computing — running one step at a time with synced pseudocode highlighting, plain-English narration of every move, live operation counters, and full timeline control at 1–25 steps per second. Every algorithm is a pure step generator emitting frame snapshots, all driven by a single playback engine. The quantum suite is an exact state-vector simulation: a clickable Bloch sphere, interfering amplitude bars, and Shor's genuine QFT spectrum. A verification harness replays every generator against randomized inputs with 340k+ assertions against reference implementations.

ReactViteTailwindQuantumVisualizationFall 2024

Skills.

Grouped by where each tool sits in the system.

Languages

7
  • Python· 4y
  • C/C++· 3y
  • JavaScript· 2y
  • Java· 1y
  • C#
  • Go
  • Rust· 6m

Rust Ecosystem

4
  • Actix· web
  • Axum· web
  • Tauri· desktop
  • Dioxus· ui

Frontend

4
  • React.js· 1y
  • Tailwind CSS
  • Material UI
  • HTML5 / CSS3

Backend & Data

7
  • Node.js
  • .NET
  • Express
  • Spring Boot
  • PostgreSQL
  • MongoDB
  • Redis

AI / ML

7
  • PyTorch
  • TensorFlow
  • MediaPipe
  • YOLO v8
  • OpenCV
  • Scikit-learn
  • PyTesseract

Microsoft Stack

5
  • D365 FinOps
  • D365 CRM
  • Power Platform
  • Power Automate
  • Azure

Agentic / Automation

4
  • MCP
  • Langflow
  • Make.ai
  • SignalR

DevOps & Tooling

6
  • Docker
  • Terraform
  • Grafana
  • SonarQube
  • Git
  • JMeter

Parallel Computing

5
  • POSIX Threads
  • MPI
  • OpenMP
  • CUDA
  • Hadoop

Certifications.

Verified credentials across quantum computing, cloud, data, APIs, and full-stack engineering.

Awards and service.

Recognition for engineering work, academic standing, and the communities around them.

2× IEEE IBCAST 2026 · Accepted Papers

IEEE · 2026

CutQ: What Works and What Doesn’t for QAOA on Max-Cut (sole author) and Agentic Multi-Modal Triage of Citizen Flood Reports at Scale (first author).

1st Runner-Up · HackOps'25

FAST-NUCES · Apr 2025

Awarded for Jild, an AI skincare analysis tool achieving 83.8% mAP@50 across acne and dark spot detection.

Top Intern · Golden Key

Dawlance · Aug 2025

Recognized for delivering a real-time industrial analytics platform that significantly enhanced factory operational visibility.

2× Rector's List · Gold Medal

FAST-NUCES · 2024 - 2025

Top GPA in the cohort across two semesters, each Rector's List recognition came with the semester Gold Medal. Latest in Fall 2025 with a perfect 4.0/4.0 GPA.

3× Dean's List

FAST-NUCES · 2022 - 2024

Three semesters on the Dean's List for sustained academic excellence across the BSCS program.

Emerald Contributor

Microsoft Azure DB · Apr 2024 - Apr 2025

Resolved 15+ community issues and contributed documentation enhancements for Azure DB for MySQL.

Frontend Head · ACM NUCES

ACM Web Development · Sep 2024 - Present

Led a team of 8 developers across 4 projects, including the Coders Cup registration portal. Ongoing for 1 yr 9 mos.

Postman Student Leader

Postman · May 2024 - Jan 2025

Conducted API workshops for 150+ students across multiple universities; 9-month tenure.

MongoDB Subject Matter Expert

MongoDB · Jul 2024 - Jan 2025

Reviewed 50+ Associate Developer Python Certification exam questions alongside 3 other SMEs.

SOP & Compliance Head · PROCOM

FAST-NUCES · Sep - Nov 2024

Led SOP and compliance for PROCOM, FAST-NUCES's flagship tech competition.

Moments.

Medals, hackathons, internships, and the people in the room.

Final Year Project · Completion

FAST-NUCES · May 2026

Final Year Project · Completion

Wrapped the Final Year Project on Agentic Multi-Modal Triage of Citizen Flood Reports with my supervisor and group. 98.84% accuracy on the CVFD and a published dataset to show for it.

Rector's List · Gold Medal

FAST-NUCES · Fall 2025

Rector's List · Gold Medal

Rector's List and semester Gold Medal for a perfect 4.0/4.0 GPA in Fall 2025, the final year of the BSCS program.

Golden Key · Top Intern

Dawlance · Arçelik Türkiye · Aug 2025

Golden Key · Top Intern

Awarded the Golden Key for delivering the real-time industrial analytics platform that replaced legacy SAP and vendor systems with €60K in savings.

AI Internship · MazikGlobal

MazikGlobal Pakistan · Jun 2025

AI Internship · MazikGlobal

Joined as AI Intern. Built a real-time exercise posture detection system at 94% accuracy on TensorFlow + MediaPipe.

1st Runner-Up · HackOps'25

FAST-NUCES · Apr 2025

1st Runner-Up · HackOps'25

Brought home the trophy with Jild, an AI skincare analysis tool at 83.8% mAP@50, built end-to-end in 36 hours.

ACM Frontend Head

ACM NUCES · Sep 2024

ACM Frontend Head

Took over as Web Development Frontend Head, leading 8 developers across 4 projects.

Rector's List · Gold Medal

FAST-NUCES · 2024

Rector's List · Gold Medal

Rector's List and semester Gold Medal, awarded for the top GPA in the BSCS cohort.

Runner-Up · Intra-Parli Debate

FAST-NUCES · Dec 2022

Runner-Up · Intra-Parli Debate

Took the runner-up trophy at the intra-parliamentary debate. Constructive disagreement, on the clock.

President · Sceptre Literati

Sceptre College · Oct 2021

President · Sceptre Literati

Badged in as President of the Sceptre Literati Society. Pre-university leadership where the habit of showing up started.

What people say.

Notes from mentors, team leads, and collaborators. Swipe or drag.

“One area where Sunny truly shines is in his leadership skills, setting him apart from his peers. His ability to work hard and solve problems efficiently has been evident throughout our collaboration. Sunny consistently demonstrates respect for his seniors and displays a keen enthusiasm for learning new skills.”

Muhammad Hassan Naviwala

Muhammad Hassan Naviwala

Dynamics AX/365 FO Technical Consultant @ MazikGlobal · Microsoft Certified Trainer

Let’s talk.

Open to engineering roles and interesting problems.

Email is the fastest way to reach me. I read everything and reply within a couple of days.