Ahmed Muharram

AI/ML Engineer based in Cairo, Egypt. I build production tool-calling LLM agents, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems, and high-throughput backend infrastructure end to end, with a focus on systems and scientific LLM agents.

About

I'm a recent graduate of the University of Pennsylvania (Bachelor's and Master's in Computer and Information Science, May 2026) and an Onsi Sawiris Scholar. I care about clarity, reliability, and the human experience of software, and I work where systems and AI meet, bringing rigor to complex problems while keeping people at the center. I build privacy-first AI products and tool-calling LLM agents for scientific workflows, with a background that spans research and industry.

Education

University of Pennsylvania, Master of Science in Engineering in Computer and Information Science (Apr 2024 to May 2026).
University of Pennsylvania, Bachelor of Science in Engineering in Computer and Information Science (Aug 2022 to May 2026), with minors in Mathematics, Data Science, and Engineering Entrepreneurship.
Onsi Sawiris Scholar: a fully funded, merit-based scholarship awarded to top Egyptian students for study at leading US universities.

Experience

R&D Software Developer, Orascom Construction (Jul 2026 to Present).
AI/ML Engineer, Fidelity Investments (Dec 2025 to Jan 2026). Productionized and scaled an internal LLM/RAG system, expanding it to arbitrary enterprise data sources via a standardized connector, ingestion, and indexing template. Replaced a BM25S index with a custom hybrid PostgreSQL full-text search + pgvector design, cutting refresh latency from 10 minutes per 1M chunks to under 1 second; built multivector and late-interaction retrieval with hybrid-score reranking and a sharded Qdrant cluster. Now used in production by around 200 daily R&D users.
Data Science and AI Intern, Fidelity Investments (Jun 2025 to Aug 2025). Architected a high-throughput ingestion pipeline for terabytes of data at 99.99%+ success (schema validation, retries, idempotent writes); built a grounded RAG application on Qdrant and pgvector with hallucination checks and an evaluation harness; containerized with Docker and Kubernetes.
Software Engineering Intern (AI Integration), Aydi (Jun 2024 to Aug 2024). Built a low-connectivity chatbot for agricultural business owners (Haystack, MongoDB Atlas, Redis, GPT-4o) with 85%+ top-1 retrieval accuracy; reduced LLM spend by 96.25% via a cost and quality model migration.

Master's Thesis (University of Pennsylvania, 2026)

How Underspecified Prompts Shape Tool-Calling LLM Agents in Scientific Workflows, advised by Chris Callison-Burch and read by Eric Wong. Through two open-source case studies on the Kani framework (LAMINA, a 50-tool materials-feasibility agent, and PathFinder, a 44-tool pathogen-genomics agent), it finds that prompt underspecification dominates model scale, routing policy, and task complexity as a source of agent failure, with instability localizing to the natural-language-to-tool-invocation mapping rather than to tool execution. This work received the Penn Engineering Outstanding Research Award.

Selected Projects

PathFinder: a 44-tool pathogen-genomics LLM agent on a pydantic-ai and LangGraph pipeline (scoping, discovery, planning, execution, verification) that compiles natural-language questions into executable WDK strategy graphs across the 14-database VEuPathDB consortium (PlasmoDB, ToxoDB, CryptoDB, VectorBase, and others), with pgvector catalog grounding; now being integrated into the VEuPathDB platform. https://github.com/ahmedomuharram/pathfinder
LAMINA: a 50-tool materials-feasibility LLM agent over CALPHAD, Materials Project DFT, and CHGNet neural surrogates that turns open-ended feasibility questions into traceable, executable tool workflows. https://github.com/ahmedomuharram/lamina
ScenIQ: on-prem, security-first meeting intelligence (SOC 2, GDPR, and HIPAA aligned) that turns meeting video into transcripts, topics, and action items via FFmpeg, speaker diarization, Whisper transcription, segmentation, and action-item extraction; FastAPI, PostgreSQL + pgvector, Zoom/Teams ingestion, and ClickUp/Jira outputs. https://sceniq.app
ByteNet: a distributed web search engine on a custom Java stack (webserver, distributed key-value store, RDD-style framework) with a ~500k-URL crawler and distributed TF-IDF + iterative PageRank on AWS EC2.
InstaLite: a full-stack Instagram clone on AWS with semantic profile search and real-time chat over WebSockets.
PennOS: a UNIX-like OS simulator with a preemptive SIGALRM scheduler (priority queues) and a PennFAT (FAT16-style) filesystem.

Skills

Agents and LLM frameworks: tool-calling and multi-agent systems, RAG, prompt engineering, model routing, guardrails; pydantic-ai, LangGraph, LangChain, Haystack, Kani, Vercel AI SDK; OpenAI, Anthropic, and Gemini APIs.
Retrieval, embeddings, and LLM ops: pgvector (HNSW), Qdrant, BM25, hybrid, multivector, and late-interaction retrieval, reranking, nomic-embed, Whisper; OpenTelemetry, Langfuse, SigNoz; LLM evaluation (QWK, F1, bootstrap CIs).
Backend and languages: Python, TypeScript, SQL, Java, C; FastAPI, Pydantic, SQLAlchemy, asyncpg; REST, OpenAPI, WebSockets, Server-Sent Events; distributed systems.
Frontend: React, Next.js, Vite, Tailwind, Zustand, TanStack Query, ReactFlow.
Cloud and DevOps: PostgreSQL, Redis, MongoDB; Docker, Kubernetes, AWS (EC2, RDS); GitHub Actions, CI/CD; Pytest, Vitest, Playwright.

Awards

Penn Engineering Outstanding Research Award, for the Master's thesis on tool-calling LLM agents in scientific workflows.
Onsi Sawiris Scholar.