Hey 😃 I'm Nir, an undergraduate majoring in Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. Here's some more about me:
- 💻 This semester I'm TAing 15-122: Principles of Imperative Computation at CMU. Very excited help students with correctness/safety proofs and data structures and algorithms in C!
- 🔭 This summer I'm excited to be interning at Palantir as a SWE Intern in the Production Infrastructure org (Apollo team). Systems programming! Last summer I worked as a SWE intern at Firebolt Inc, where I got to work with machine learning, distributed systems, and databases in a cutting-edge industry environment (see below for more detail).
- 🏆 Hackathons:
- Recently won at CMU TartanHacks, CMU's largest hackathon (>1000 hackers and 279 submitted projects), with BallotGuide. It's a website designed to address low voter turnout with custom visualizations of how your local election ballot will actually affect your life. See this cool gif demo of the website's features.
- In 2025 I won at the UC Berkeley AI Hackathon, the largest AI-themed Hackathon in the world, with my project Truely. It's a browser extension that deploys agents to verify facts on your page and annotates misinfo/deepfakes with citations! See the repo+devpost below if you're interested :)
- 📚 Recent papers I've enjoyed reading have focused on language modeling, robot learning, game theory/behavioral economics, genetic algorithms, and other fields in AI (hyperlinked one per category). Hit me up if you have any paper recommendations you think I'd enjoy!
- 📫 Reach me via my linkedin!
- 🥴 (Bonus: if you can't already tell, I love emojis)
Languages
Robot Caregiving and Human Interaction (RCHI) Lab @ CMU (Jan 2026 – Present)
- Under Prof. Zackory Erickson, working on robot learning for physical human-robot interaction.
- See the GenSimPHRI website for our recent work on text2sim2real, a framework for generating expert real-life policies entirely from short task descriptions -- no demonstrations or finetuning!
Foundations of Cooperative AI Lab (FOCAL) @ CMU (Nov 2025 – Present)
- Under Prof. Vincent Conitzer, investigating how memory size, memory horizon, reasoning length, and incentive structure affect strategic behavior of LLM agents in repeated economic games.
Assistive Sensing Systems (2020 – 2025)
- Invented and developed a device (patented: US 10830626 B2) that helps blind people prevent overpouring.
- Published research on using LiDAR ToF sensing for material level indication in DTIS 2025 (print pending).
Carnegie Mellon University | B.S. in Computer Science (GPA: 4.0/4.0).
Technical Courses: Completed
- 15-122: Principles of Imperative Computation — 99.05%
- 15-151: Mathematical Foundations for Computer Science — 99.61%
- 21-241: Matrices and Linear Transformations — 99.24%
Technical Courses: In Progress
- 15-150: Functional Programming
- 15-213: Introduction to Computer Systems
- 21-266: Vector Calculus using Matrix Algebra
- 21-270: Introduction to Mathematical Finance
Software Engineer Intern – Firebolt Inc. (Summer 2025)
- Trained an RNN model with AWS SageMaker to predict AWS EC2 capacity and customer demand for warmpool sizing, then deployed the entire data cleaning, featurization, and inference pipeline to a Go gRPC microservice.
- Developing a Go + gRPC tool that benchmarks data‑warehouse performance across cluster shapes, query acceleration settings, and caching strategies.
- Giving engineers a use-case-accurate perf-gate for new features and safeguarding Firebolt’s claim as the world’s fastest data warehouse.
Software Engineer Intern – SDF Labs → dbt Labs (Summer 2024)
- Led end‑to‑end development of the Reports cloud‑console feature (built with Svelte, TypeScript, TailwindCSS), used to track metadata across data workloads.
- Scraped & normalised SQL‑dialect metadata in Python to power cross‑dialect compilation.
Co‑founder & CEO – Extentek LLC (2018 ‑ 2025)
- Invented and patented (see US Patent US 10830626 B2) an over‑pour prevention device for blind users.
- Raised funding & spoke at global accessibility conferences (AHG, M‑Enabling, GeekWire).
Intern & Team Lead – SEAL Lab @ UW (Summer 2023)
- Managed a team of interns to write an NIH STTR R41 grant, bringing the lab’s software to millions.
| Project | Tech Stack | What It Does |
|---|---|---|
| 🪴 Verde | Flutter · Supabase |
Real-time map for community-driven environmental action. Scrapes and clusters issues, generates events, and gamifies eco-impact. Built in under 24 hours for HackMIT 2025. |
| 🔍 Truely | TypeScript · Svelte |
Annotates misinformation & deepfakes in-page via multi-agent LLMs and live web search. |
| ⚙️ Mini Prop Shop | Go · PyTorch · K8s |
Replays 1.2 B BTC ticks, serves sub-20 ms trading signals, and nightly fine-tunes an LSTM model. |
| 📈 Arduino Stock Ticker |  C++ · Finnhub API |
Displays live price, symbol, %-change on a physical ticker—refreshed every minute. |
| 🧩 Canvas Submission Orchestrator | Python · Canvas API · Teams API |
Auto-assigns student submissions to TAs based on preferences, pinging assignments via Teams. |
| 🧦 Sock Match iOS | Swift · Create ML |
iOS app that lets blind users match socks with camera; on-device ML for real-time accessibility. |