Sep 2022 - Present
Moughees Ahmed - 🇨🇦
LOOKING for (part-time) AI research roles at startups - interested in discovering new knowledge using LLMs, improving core learning algorithms, on-device inference of mid-sized models, and bioML
About Me
- Bio: I am Moughees, born and raised in Pakistan.
- Twitter: I am super super active on X.
- ML Research: I spent two years (before the hype) leading cutting-edge TTS/ASR models for low-resource languages at an NLP lab in Pakistan funded by Facebook. My work was covered by Voice of America (Urdu).
- First Startup Experience: Realizing the lack of resources in Pakistan, I convinced a New York startup to sponsor me to Toronto over a cold DM on Twitter. (Sent 300 embarrassing msgs to succeed)
- I was engineer #1 at Column and helped build the team; Column went on to join Techstars. For over a year, I did my research job during the day and helped Column at nights whilst still in Pakistan.
- Current Role:After leaving Column, I joined Loop, a leading fintech in Toronto, where I am a senior engineer. Loop has raised 5M+ and has grown over 400 percent since I joined.
- At Loop, I have worked on products that have moved millions of dollars helping small businesses.
- I have led many end-to-end projects like 2FA Auth, cross border money movement, Banking as a Service, cross-currency conversions, multi-user support and many more.
- BioML Research: I convinced a post-doc at an infectious disease lab to let me assist on his genomics project remotely. I trained models on read-level DNA to predict presence of specific genes before fully sequencing a gene. We were able to get 90 percent + accuracy. Sadly, we could not publish since a different lab published a similar method in Nature. My interest in bioML has grown immensely since.
- Hackathons: Jealous of SF, I decided to throw my own builders hackathon with sponsorships from Chroma, Replit and Cohere - gave away 5K in cash prizes
Previous Experience
Jan 2021 - Sep 2022
Founding Engineer (Raised 2M), Column
Jun 2020 - Dec 2021
Generative AI Research (Speech/Deepfakes), CSALT (NLP Research Lab)
Occasional Writings
Products built
Products built at Loop
Links to Loop's blog on my products