Mo Shirmohammadi

Network and systems engineer working across BGP/OSPF fabrics, eBPF data planes, and cloud infrastructure — plus the automation and observability that keep them online. Passionate about engineering at the intersection of reliability and social impact.

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Los Angeles, CA · B.S. Computer Science, USC (Dec 2027)

🌐 Networks Segmented

45+

🟢 Uptime SLA

99.9%

👥 Students Served

30,000+

⚡ Fewer Dispatches

60%

Currently working on

In progress

Building in public

A behind the scenes look at what I'm building right now. Raw, unfiltered, straight from the bench. I'll refresh this clip as the work moves forward.

Speaking

Mo Shirmohammadi delivering a TEDx talk at La Sierra University, on stage beside the slide reading 'What if we measured the wrong thing?'

TEDxVideo coming soon

TEDxLaSierraUniversity · 2026

What if we measured the wrong thing?

Selected as 1 of 9 speakers from 400+ applicants. The argument: what we've called “intelligence” for a hundred years was mostly obedience to machine logic — read this, output that, follow the steps. AI started doing all of it better than us, and the students I've taught for four years at Code Can Bridge, the ones written off as “not cut out for coding,” were already showing us something different. We didn't have a talent shortage. We had a measurement problem.

Read the announcement

Themes

AI & cognitionEducationNeurodiversityCode Can Bridge

Hackathons

Hacktech 2026

Hacktech 2026 · Caltech

Recruit — autonomous job application agent

Tell it what roles you want; it spins up parallel AI agents that find jobs, tailor your resume, submit, and follow up — all while you sleep. Built on Ashby with a chat-style onboarding where agents wake up one by one. Shipped with Om Sanan, Owen Fisher, and Jimin Bang.

🥇1st place — Y Combinator track
🥉3rd place — Sideshift track

Read the announcement

Education & Recognition

Education

University of Southern California

B.S. expected Dec 2027

B.S. Computer Science · GPA 3.90 · Upper Division 4.0

Presidential ScholarDean's ListProgressive Degree Program (PDP)

Pasadena City College

A.S. Computer Science

GPA 3.83 · Data Structures, Linear Algebra, Multivariable Calc, Differential Equations

Coursework

Computer Networks, Distributed Systems, Operating Systems, Computer Architecture, Algorithms, Probability Theory, Discrete Methods, Software Engineering, Advanced Internetworking (Fall 2026)

Awards

TEDx Speaker (May 2026)
Top 10 — OpenAI Parameter Competition (2026)
1st Place, Y Combinator Track — Caltech Hackathon (2026)
1st Place — HTCC Honors Conference (2024)
2x Gold Presidential Volunteer Service Award

Featured In

Forbes MagazinePOCIT (People of Color in Tech)PCC CourierUSC SHINE Research

Products

IRL

Video-first social platform I solo-built and self-funded — $26K earned working three minimum-wage jobs at once — pivoting core features from user interviews to scale school-by-school to 470+ users. Hybrid real-time layer pairing Agora WebRTC (50ms voice/data) with Socket.io for presence and typing indicators, behind an NGINX reverse proxy handling SSL termination, WebSocket upgrades, and load balancing across multiple Node.js instances.

Founder & Lead Engineer · March 2024 – January 2026

React NativeTypeScriptNode.jsAgora WebRTCSocket.IONGINXMongoDBAWS

Picasso Visual AI

AI that draws and narrates visual answers in real-time with animated SVG illustrations, voice narration, and web search integration.

Next.jsClaude APIElevenLabsSVGGoogle Search

Try it live

BabyGuard

Contactless baby breathing monitor that turns a $4 ESP32 and any WiFi router into a real-time infant apnea detection system. No wearables, no cameras — just physics.

PythonCESP-IDFNumPySciPyThree.js

Repository

BabyGuard WiFi breathing monitor visualization

Networking & Systems

TradeNet Fabric

Low-latency software-defined trading network simulator modeling multi-site trading infrastructure with BGP and OSPF routing across 3 data centers and exchange colocations in EVE-NG.

PythonBGPOSPFeBPF

NetShield

High-performance Linux firewall using eBPF/XDP for line-rate packet processing, filtering in sub-microsecond time before packets enter the kernel stack.

eBPFXDPCLinux

More Projects

Surgical Data Mesh Platform

Production-style data platform for robotic surgery telemetry with durable ingest, real-time safety alerting, and a lakehouse analytics path.

SurgGraph Pipeline

Graph-enhanced robotic surgery analytics pipeline prototype focused on bottleneck detection, recovery-risk modeling, and workflow intelligence.

Distributed Task Queue

Production-grade distributed queue in pure Python with WAL persistence, retries, deduplication, circuit breaker protections, and DAG scheduling.

Database Replication Engine

PostgreSQL-inspired replication system from scratch with WAL propagation, leader election, automatic failover, and split-brain handling.

KV Store Engine

Java key-value engine with a custom open-addressing hash table, TTL eviction strategies, and atomic snapshot persistence.

Load Balancer from Scratch

Java load balancer implementing six routing algorithms with health checks, concurrency controls, and failure simulation.

Raft Consensus Simulator

Consensus simulator featuring deterministic leader election, log replication behavior, and fault injection scenarios.

Transformer LM from Scratch

GPT-style decoder model implemented from first principles with manual backpropagation and comprehensive test coverage.

LSM-Tree Storage Engine

WAL, memtables, SSTables, compaction, and Bloom filters.

Postgres-backed Pub/Sub Queue

Durable messaging with consumer-group offsets and ACID semantics.

SQL Database Engine

Parser, executor, indexing, persistence, and REPL.

HTTP Server from Scratch

Multithreaded HTTP/1.1 server over raw TCP sockets with middleware and routing.

Container Runtime from Scratch

Docker/OCI runtime simulator with namespace and cgroup mechanics.

Search Engine from Scratch

Inverted index with BM25 ranking, boolean queries, and lightweight UI.

DNS Resolver from Scratch

Iterative DNS resolver over raw UDP sockets from root servers.

Memory Allocator Simulator

Heap placement strategies: first-fit, best-fit, and worst-fit.

Myers Diff from Scratch

Myers diff algorithm implementation with unified diff output.

B-Tree Index from Scratch

B-Tree index implementation with CLI visualization.

Raytracer from Scratch

C++17 ray tracer with shading, reflections, anti-aliasing, and multithreaded rendering.

Robot Log Analyzer

Automated anomaly detection and root-cause triage for robotics V&V logs.

Experience

Software Engineering Intern

Intuitive Surgical

Summer 2026

Building cloud-native data infrastructure on AWS and Kubernetes, with distributed pipelines, microservices, and APIs ingesting high-volume telemetry from da Vinci surgical robots and manufacturing systems for downstream analytics and ML.
Engineering a real-time Kafka/Flink service that flattens high-volume data streams with low latency and low cost, generalizing it into a reusable transformer for other business domains where data flattening is critical.
Implementing observability and infrastructure as code; hardening services through unit/integration testing, code reviews, and security fixes in an Agile workflow.

Network Engineer

Access Tech Security

January 2025 - June 2026

Led network and security deployments at 9+ major client sites (La Salle, Flintridge, Lake Elsinore) as primary liaison between Access Tech and Verkada, owning client relationships, multi-vendor coordination, and end-to-end delivery from site survey to cutover.
Segmented 45+ client networks (20 to 500 endpoints) with VLANs, inter-VLAN routing, and ACLs across Cisco Catalyst, Ubiquiti UniFi, and FortiGate, isolating cloud-connected IoT security devices from corporate traffic while maintaining a 99.9% uptime SLA.
Automated configuration backups and inventory tracking via Python (Netmiko) and Excel macros, reducing manual audit time by 15 hours weekly and eliminating configuration drift across 80+ managed switches.
Implemented SNMP-based monitoring (PRTG) across 35 client sites, establishing proactive alerting that reduced emergency dispatch calls by 60% and cut average incident response time to 45 minutes.
Managed structured cabling deployments across 23 commercial sites (medical, retail, warehouse), completing 15,000+ ft of Cat6/Cat6a and fiber runs at a 100% Fluke DSX-5000 certification pass rate.
Diagnosed coverage gaps and co-channel interference across 18 high-density sites using Ekahau/AirMagnet surveys, then optimized channel plans and repositioned APs to lift average client signal from -72 dBm to -58 dBm and clear persistent dead zones.
Standardized rack build procedures and documentation templates, cutting average deployment time from 12 to 6.5 hours per site and post-install support tickets by 40%.

Founder & Lead Engineer

LansoAI (Pasadena City College)

April 2023 - March 2025

Shipped a full-stack AI chatbot serving 30,000+ students with 640+ daily queries; centralized fragmented campus resources into a single conversational interface.
Engineered a Node.js/Express backend for OpenAI GPT-4 integration with custom rate limiting and request caching, cutting response time 50%.
Built a RAG pipeline (vector embeddings, k-NN semantic search) indexing 900+ documents with sub-100ms retrieval; reduced hallucinations 40%.
Iterated prompts using MongoDB interaction logs as ground truth, boosting answer accuracy from 38% to 66%.
Established a CI/CD pipeline (GitHub Actions, 50+ unit/integration tests) and Redis session caching, cutting deployment errors 60% and API costs 36%.
Integrated Sentry error logging enabling sub-hour incident response and 99.9% uptime.

Founder

Code Can Bridge

December 2021 - June 2023

Founded a nonprofit teaching coding to students with learning disabilities; scaled to 3 branches and 80+ students; featured in Forbes Magazine.
Designed an adaptive curriculum and recruited/mentored 10+ volunteer instructors; iterated lesson plans based on student learning outcomes across multiple schools.

Lead Sensei of Curriculum Engagement

Code Ninjas

Jan 2023 - Feb 2025

Designed a parent-teacher conference platform used by 80+ families.
Led Python/C# game-development camps and curriculum delivery for youth learners.

About

I'm a Computer Science major at USC (B.S. expected Dec 2027), a Presidential Scholar, and accepted into USC's Progressive Degree Program — an optional path to an accelerated M.S. My engineering style is pragmatic: design for reliability first, instrument every critical path, and let measurable outcomes drive iteration. Most of what I know came from production networks — segmenting client sites, chasing co-channel interference, automating the audits nobody wants to do by hand. Outside class and internships I build routing fabrics, packet filters, and from-scratch engines to sharpen that intuition.

Networking & Protocols

ARPBGPOSPFTCP/IPVLANsACLsSNMPeBPFWebRTC

Infrastructure & Tools

Linux (*nix CLI)Cisco IOS/IOS-XEAristaJuniperEVE-NGDockerWiresharktcpdumpAnsibleNornirNetmikoAWS

Programming

PythonC++BashGitJSONGraphQL

Also Build With

JavaScriptTypeScriptJavaNode.jsReact NativePostgreSQLMongoDBRedisKafkaKubernetesOpenAI APIRAG Pipelines

Let's connect

Open to software engineering internships and collaboration.

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