Sami El-Imam
Software Engineer
I'm a Computer Engineering student at the University of Waterloo with hands-on experience building backend data pipelines, APIs, and frontend applications through multiple software engineering internships. I enjoy optimizing distributed systems, improving reliability, and building tools that make workflows faster and more efficient. Outside of internships, I build personal projects exploring LLMs and full-stack web development.
Experience
Developed data pipelines using SQS, C#, and REST APIs to aggregate analytics from 10 endpoints running on each of 100+ SaaS servers, improving data flow efficiency across distributed systems. Optimized PostgreSQL table organization, applying targeted indexing to centralize distributed data and support scalable query performance. Improved stability of the React application by redesigning state management techniques to remove data inconsistencies during data import operations. Developed processes for repairing servers in a corrupted update state and wrote supporting documentation speeding up the repair process by 90%.
Refactored a legacy BI plugin using jQuery, modularized functions, and optimized DOM manipulation, enabling multilingual support for 7+ languages. Integrated historical speed data into real-time machine views using REST APIs and managed data flow with Redux, enabling trend-based performance analysis. Developed unit and integration tests for frontend (Jest) and backend APIs (MOQ), maintaining +95% code coverage. Enhanced reliability of SaaS server update processes by applying input validation and data sanitization using C# to mitigate deployment issues.
Secured API infrastructure by implementing role-based access controls, request validation, and logging in Azure API Manager, ensuring data compliance. Automated payroll data transfers to Workday by scripting API calls with PowerAutomate, cutting manual processing time by 50% and eliminating recurring errors. Centralized 300+ engineering documents via a Python script from OneNote into structured Azure DevOps wiki articles by parsing HTML tags, improving onboarding speed and cross-team collaboration.
Developed C++ and Python unit tests and automated feedback scripts to streamline grading and deliver faster, personalized responses for over 400 students. Utilized Selenium web scraping to automate the copying of 1000s of student code submissions from an automated testing platform to a platform for manual review. Mentored students through debugging and project reviews during office hours, improving assignment success rates and strengthening practical engineering skills.
Projects
Built an Android app using local (Google Gemma) and cloud (GPT-4o) LLMs to suggest forgotten words from real-time speech. Integrated the use of local and non-local LLMs giving users the choice of performance or privacy. Collaborated with a 5-person team to develop supporting UI and quiz features for reinforcing language retention. (May 2024 - August 2024)
Built a web app to schedule SMS messages with media attachments using Twilio, supporting custom delivery times. Designed RESTful Express.js API with full CRUD functionality for managing user profiles and scheduled messages. Achieved 95%+ on-time SMS delivery rate by implementing backend queue logic for time-based message dispatch. Facilitated initial user adoption by recruiting 10 early testers, gathering actionable feedback that informed iterative enhancements to the message scheduling platform. (August 2020 - September 2020)