Syed Jafri

Hardware & Software Engineer
Building at the boundary of silicon & software

See More Resume ↗ Projects Research

Projects

Software & hardware work across industries, shipped and in-progress.

EnterpriseSoftware

DevOps Pipeline Orchestrator

CLI tool and dashboard for managing multi-environment deployments with automated rollback, health checks, and Slack integration.

TypeScriptNode.jsDockerRedis
View → Live

EnterpriseSoftware

ML Inference Engine

Lightweight WASM-compiled neural network runtime that runs quantized models in-browser with zero server dependency.

RustWASMONNXWebGPU
View → Open Source

EnterpriseSoftware

Microservices API Framework

Opinionated Go framework for building observable microservices with tracing, circuit-breaking, and gRPC/REST dual-mode routing.

GogRPCPrometheusKubernetes
View → Open Source

EnterpriseSoftware

Systems Monitoring Dashboard

Real-time infra dashboard with sub-second latency, WebSocket streaming, time-series aggregation, and anomaly alerts.

ReactWebSocketInfluxDBPython
View → Live

SalesSoftware

Pipeline Forecasting Engine

Weighted forecast modeling built on historical win rates and stage velocity, with scenario what-ifs and rep-level roll-ups.

PythonFastAPIPostgresscikit-learn
View → Live

SalesSoftware

Lead Enrichment Pipeline

Event-driven enrichment service handling identity resolution, fuzzy dedupe, and bidirectional CRM sync with conflict reconciliation.

GoKafkaPostgresSalesforce API
View → Complete

SalesSoftware

Outbound Sequencer

Multichannel sequencing engine with deliverability guardrails, reply detection, and automatic pause when a meeting is booked.

TypeScriptTemporalPostgresSendGrid
View → Live

SalesSoftware

Call Intelligence Summarizer

Transcribes discovery calls, scores them against a qualification framework, and writes structured notes and next steps back to the CRM.

PythonWhisperClaude APIHubSpot
View → In Progress

SalesSoftware

Quote & Proposal Builder

CPQ flow with tiered pricing rules, discount approval chains, and templated proposal generation handed off to e-signature.

Next.jsPrismaStripeDocuSign
View → Open Source

CreativeSoftware

Generative Poster System

Parametric design tool that produces seeded, reproducible layouts from a grammar of grids, palettes, and type scales. Exports print-ready SVG and PDF.

p5.jsCanvasSVGTypeScript
View → Live

CreativeSoftware

Audio-Reactive Shader Playground

WebGL visualizer driven by live FFT analysis, with preset morphing, MIDI controller bindings, and hot-reloading GLSL editing.

WebGLGLSLWeb AudioReact
View → Open Source

CreativeSoftware

Motion Timeline Editor

Keyframe editor with editable bezier easing curves, onion-skinning, and export to Lottie JSON or raw CSS keyframe animations.

ReactCanvasLottieZustand
View → In Progress

CreativeSoftware

Procedural Texture Baker

Node-graph texture generator with GPU-accelerated live preview and one-click PBR map export for albedo, normal, roughness, and AO.

RustwgpuWASMegui
View → Complete

CreativeSoftware

Variable Font Inspector

Specimen tool for auditing variable axes, kerning pairs, and OpenType feature coverage across arbitrary sample text and weights.

TypeScriptOpenType.jsHarfBuzzVite
View → Open Source

CreativeHardware

FPGA Video Processing Core

Real-time HDMI video pipeline on Spartan-7 implementing edge detection and LUT-based color grading at 1080p60.

VHDLVivadoHDMISpartan-7
View → In Progress

GameSoftware

Procedural Dungeon Roguelike

Turn-based roguelike with wave-function-collapse level generation, fully deterministic seeds, and a data-driven ability system.

GodotC#GDScriptWFC
View → In Progress

GameSoftware

ECS Game Engine

Custom entity-component-system engine with a job-based scheduler, hot-reloadable gameplay modules, and a Vulkan forward+ renderer.

C++VulkanECSCMake
View → Open Source

GameSoftware

Rollback Netcode Layer

Deterministic lockstep networking with rollback, client-side prediction, and lag compensation for 2–8 player matches.

RustUDPTokioProtobuf
View → Complete

GameSoftware

Physics Puzzle Platformer

2D platformer built on a custom verlet soft-body solver, with full gamepad support, Steam achievements, and 40 hand-authored levels.

UnityC#Shader GraphSteamworks
View → Live

GameSoftware

AI Behavior Tree Toolkit

Visual editor for authoring behavior trees and utility AI, with live in-engine debugging, blackboard inspection, and an Unreal runtime.

UnrealC++BlueprintImGui
View → Open Source

IndustrialHardware

Custom STM32 Dev Board

4-layer PCB with USB-C PD negotiation, CAN bus interface, and isolated analog front-end for industrial sensor logging.

KiCadSTM32C/C++CAN Bus
View → Complete

IndustrialHardware

IoT Environmental Monitor

Battery-powered sensor node with LoRaWAN uplink, e-ink display, and MQTT bridge. 6-month battery life on AAA cells.

ESP32LoRaWANFreeRTOSMQTT
View → Complete

Research

Papers, articles, and talks on embedded systems & silicon–software co-design.

Paper

Power-Aware Scheduling for Heterogeneous Embedded SoCs

S. Jafri, A. Patel, R. Kim

A runtime scheduler that dynamically migrates workloads between big and little cores, reducing peak power by 34% while meeting hard real-time deadlines on heterogeneous SoCs.

EmbeddedSchedulingRTOSPower
IEEE RTAS 2025 Published

Paper

WebAssembly as a Portable Firmware Sandbox

S. Jafri

Evaluates WASM as a sandboxed execution environment for untrusted firmware modules on Cortex-M, achieving memory isolation with under 8% overhead and no MMU requirement.

WASMFirmwareSecurityCortex-M
ACM EMSOFT 2024 Published

Paper

CAN Bus Anomaly Detection via Lightweight Autoencoders

S. Jafri, L. Torres

A quantized autoencoder deployed on STM32H7 detects anomalous CAN frames at 1 Mbps with 97.3% detection rate. Model fits in 14 KB flash and 6 KB RAM.

TinyMLCAN BusAutomotiveSTM32
arXiv · 2025 Preprint

Article

Signal Integrity for High-Speed PCB Design: A Practical Guide

S. Jafri

A practical deep-dive into controlled-impedance routing, differential pair tuning, and via stub mitigation for PCB designs operating above 1 GHz.

PCBSignal IntegrityDDR4Hardware
Embedded.com · 2024 Published

Talk

Rust in Embedded: From Zero to Production on Cortex-M

S. Jafri

A conference talk covering the full journey of adopting Rust for bare-metal firmware — toolchain, async embassy runtime, peripheral drivers, and C HAL interop. Live demo on a custom STM32 board.

RustEmbeddedEmbassyCortex-M
Rust Nation UK · 2025 Presented

Article

Why Your RTOS Tick Rate Is Probably Wrong

S. Jafri

Demonstrates how an incorrect RTOS tick rate causes hidden scheduling latency spikes and unnecessary wakeup energy. Presents a decision framework that reduces tick-induced idle energy by 42–91%.

RTOSFreeRTOSPowerEmbedded
Hackster.io · 2025 Published

Paper

LoRaWAN Network Slicing for Industrial IoT

S. Jafri, M. Chen, B. Osei

A network slicing framework for LoRaWAN that allocates spreading factors and channels to heterogeneous device classes, improving capacity by 2.4× under industrial interference. Validated on a 120-node testbed.

LoRaWANIoTNetwork SlicingLPWAN
IEEE IoTJ · Under Review Under Review

Paper

Exact Schedulability Bounds for Mixed-Criticality Tasks under Stochastic Execution Times

S. Jafri, A. Patel

Replaces worst-case execution time with a full probability measure over execution demand, then derives a closed-form deadline-miss bound via Chernoff concentration on the cumulative demand process. Tightens classical utilization tests by 11–19% without sacrificing soundness.

Real-TimeProbabilitySchedulingMixed-Criticality
IEEE RTSS 2025 Published

Paper

A Lattice-Theoretic Framework for Fixed-Point Error Propagation in DSP Pipelines

S. Jafri, L. Torres

Models quantization error intervals as an abstract domain linked to concrete real-valued semantics by a Galois connection, giving sound static bounds on accumulated rounding error through cascaded biquad filters. Bounds are proven optimal for monotone pipelines.

Numerical AnalysisAbstract InterpretationDSPFixed-Point
ACM TECS · 2025 Published

Paper

Spectral Partitioning for Task Mapping on Mesh Network-on-Chip Architectures

S. Jafri, M. Chen

Formulates task-to-tile placement as a normalized cut on the communication graph and solves the Fiedler-vector relaxation instead of the NP-hard integer program. Achieves a provable approximation ratio on planar meshes and cuts average hop count by 27%.

Graph TheorySpectral MethodsNoCOptimization
DATE 2025 Published

Paper

Max-Plus Algebraic Bounds on Interrupt Latency in Preemptive Firmware

S. Jafri

Casts nested interrupt arrival and service as a linear system over the max-plus semiring, so end-to-end latency becomes an eigenvalue problem. The cycle-time eigenvalue yields tight worst-case bounds validated against cycle-accurate Cortex-M7 traces with under 3% pessimism.

Max-Plus AlgebraFormal MethodsLatencyCortex-M
ACM EMSOFT · Under Review Under Review

Paper

Information-Theoretic Capacity Limits of Chirp Spread Spectrum under Co-Channel Interference

S. Jafri, B. Osei

Derives achievable rate regions for LoRa-style CSS modulation with non-orthogonal spreading factors, treating collisions as a multiple-access channel with partial interference cancellation. The capacity envelope explains the empirical throughput ceiling in dense LPWAN deployments.

Information TheoryLPWANCodingLoRa
IEEE TWC · Under Review Under Review

Paper

Lipschitz Bounds for Quantized Autoencoders in Safety-Critical Anomaly Detection

S. Jafri, L. Torres

Bounds the spectral norm of each layer to certify that post-training int8 quantization shifts reconstruction error by no more than a computable constant, giving a false-negative guarantee for on-device detectors over the training distribution's convex hull.

OptimizationQuantizationTinyMLCertification
arXiv · 2026 Preprint

Article

Worst-Case Execution Time Is a Measure Problem, Not a Benchmark

S. Jafri

Argues that taking a maximum over observed runs estimates the wrong quantity, and shows what extreme value theory actually promises — along with what it quietly assumes about independence and tail regularity in real firmware.

StatisticsWCETReal-TimeMeasurement
Embedded.com · 2026 Published

Talk

Order Theory for Firmware Engineers: Fixed Points, Lattices, and Why Your Analyzer Terminates

S. Jafri

A working introduction to the algebra behind static analysis tooling — partial orders, ascending chain conditions, and Kleene iteration — built from a live dataflow analysis of a bare-metal driver rather than textbook examples.

Order TheoryStatic AnalysisFormal MethodsFirmware
Embedded World · 2026 Presented

Awards & Certifications

Licenses, credentials, and recognitions.

View Certificate
APPLE

Apple Certified Support Technician

Apple

macOSApple HardwareIT Support
Sep 2026 Certificate
View Photos
IBM

UWxIBM

University of Washington × IBM · Hackathon

Quantum ComputingMachine Learning
May 2026 Attended
View Certificate
SAP

SAP Professional Fundamentals

SAP & Coursera

ERPEnterprise SoftwareSAP
Oct 2025 Certificate
View Certificate
U

Product Owner Certification — PSPO-1

Udemy

AgileScrumProduct Management
Jul 2025 Certificate
View Course
U

The Complete Agentic AI Engineering Course (2025)

Udemy

SDK DevelopmentCrewAIAgentic AI
2026 In Progress
View Course
FCC

Responsive Web Design Certification

freeCodeCamp

HTMLCSSFlexboxAccessibility
2026 In Progress
MIT

Quantum Computing Realities

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Quantum ComputingQubitsAlgorithms
2026 In Progress
S

Advanced Software Systems Graduate Certificate

Stanford University School of Engineering

Distributed SystemsSoftware ArchitectureSystems Design
2026 In Progress

About Me

I'm an engineer who doesn't believe in the hardware/software divide. The most interesting problems live at the boundary — where firmware talks to silicon, where network packets become physical actions, where sensors transform the world into data.

My background spans embedded systems design, PCB layout, and low-level firmware, all the way through backend services and modern web frontends. I've shipped products that run for years on coin cells and built systems handling millions of API requests per day.

When I'm not building, I'm reading IEEE papers, contributing to open-source tooling, or tinkering with something that has no good reason to exist — yet.

Languages

  • C / C++
  • Rust
  • Go
  • TypeScript
  • Python
  • VHDL

Hardware

  • KiCad / Altium
  • STM32 / ESP32
  • FPGA (Xilinx)
  • JTAG / SWD
  • Signal integrity

Infrastructure

  • Kubernetes
  • Docker
  • Terraform
  • AWS / GCP
  • Prometheus

Protocols

  • CAN Bus / LIN
  • LoRaWAN / BLE
  • SPI / I2C / UART
  • gRPC / REST
  • MQTT

Get in touch

Have a project idea or want to work together? I'd love to hear from you.

Email ↗ LinkedIn ↗ GitHub ↗

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