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. I previously interned at Stripe, Apple, Level Home, Carta and the Royal Canadian Air Force, all in infra engineering roles.

I also write occasionally on my blog.

connection

$ connection

    ip        216.73.216.103
    ipv4      probing...
    ipv6      probing...
    stack     probing... # reachability, not end-to-end routing
    location  Columbus, Ohio, US
    timezone  America/New_York
    network   Anthropic, PBC
    asn       AS16509
    =
    edge      ORD
    protocol  HTTP/2
    tls       TLSv1.3
    rtt       0 ms
    status    connected█

Highlights include:

Managing all monorepo "service" deploys to production in 8 minutes or less via AWS ECS Fargate. Increased the daily number of prd releases by one (1) order of magnitude.
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 computer systems, networking, security, and privacy. I believe privacy is a fundamental human right and I enjoy problems where strong cryptographic and privacy guarantees have to coexist with systems performance. My academic learnings has included secure multi-party computation, private computation over encrypted data, high performance networking, multicore systems, and concurrent systems.

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. I am currently learning sDDF; and working through the architecture and first prototype. Other ideas include:

creating and running my own ASN
creating a personal US - Canada VPN for Youtube
building the fastest running at home server rack in my coat closet

tech talks

Education

University of Waterloo, Computer Science.

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

Notable Coursework.

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%