Mo Shirmohammadi

Software Engineer building production-minded distributed systems, data infrastructure, and applied ML. Passionate about software at the intersection of reliability and social impact.

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Los Angeles, CA · B.S./M.S. Computer Science, USC Viterbi

👥 Students Served

30,000+

⚡ Daily Queries

640+

🚀 Latency Reduction

50%

🟢 Uptime

99.9%

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.

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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

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Products

IRL

Social video app with real-time interactions, media capture, and push workflows. Full-stack React Native + Node.js.

React NativeTypeScriptNode.jsSocket.IOMongoDBAWS

Repository Web profiles

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

Systems & Infrastructure

Surgical Data Mesh Platform

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

PythonJavaKafkaSpark

SurgGraph Pipeline

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

PythonKafkaAirflowdbt

Distributed Task Queue

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

PythonWALConcurrencyReliability

Database Replication Engine

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

TypeScriptReplicationConsensusFault Tolerance

KV Store Engine

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

JavaSpring BootData StructuresStorage Engine

Load Balancer from Scratch

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

JavaNetworkingDistributed SystemsConcurrency

Raft Consensus Simulator

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

Distributed SystemsConsensusFault Injection

Transformer LM from Scratch

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

PythonDeep LearningBackpropagationTesting

More Projects

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

Founding Software Engineer

Pasadena City College

Dec 2024 - Aug 2025

Shipped a full-stack generative AI chatbot serving 30,000+ students and handling 640+ daily queries.
Cut response latency by 50% with backend rate limiting, caching, and optimized OpenAI API orchestration.
Improved answer accuracy from 38% to 66% through interaction-log-driven prompt iteration.
Built CI/CD with GitHub Actions and 50+ automated tests, reducing deployment errors by 60%.
Launched RAG with vector search over 900+ documents and reduced hallucinations by 40%.
Sustained 99.9% uptime with centralized Sentry error telemetry and sub-hour incident response.

Verkada Systems Technician

Access Tech Security

Apr 2023 - Present

Resolved hardware-software integration failures across 150+ client sites with a 90% first-visit resolution rate.
Configured enterprise VLAN/subnet/static-IP network setups for reliable IoT cloud connectivity.
Automated cross-platform data synchronization with Python against Sonar, ROE, and GraphQL APIs.

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 in USC's accelerated B.S./M.S. Computer Science track. My engineering style is pragmatic: design for reliability first, instrument every critical path, and let measurable outcomes drive iteration. Outside class and internships, I build from-scratch engines and simulators to sharpen systems intuition — replication, scheduling, storage internals, consensus, and model pipelines.

Languages

PythonJavaScriptTypeScriptJavaC++SwiftSQLBash

Backend & APIs

Node.jsExpressDjangoSpring BootFastAPIGraphQL

Data & Infra

PostgreSQLMongoDBCassandraElasticsearchRedisKafkaSparkIcebergAirflowdbtDockerKubernetesTerraformAWS

AI/ML

OpenAI APIRAG PipelinesVector EmbeddingsTensorFlowPyTorchPrompt Engineering

Let's connect

Open to software engineering internships and collaboration.

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