Hi, I'm Belal — a software engineer from Cal State Fullerton focused on backend systems, big data pipelines, and applied AI. I like the boring problems: throughput, schemas, latency, and the seams between services.
I'm a recent Computer Science grad from California State University, Fullerton who gravitates toward the parts of software most people skip past.
My core is backend engineering — designing APIs that don't fall over, modeling data so future-me doesn't curse past-me, and stitching services together with authentication, queues, and sane error budgets. Lately I've been pulling that discipline into applied AI: training computer vision models, wiring them to production endpoints, and shipping the unglamorous infrastructure around them.
Outside of code I'm reading about systems design, watching markets do silly things, and quietly building side projects. If you're working on something ambitious — especially in fintech, data tooling, or AI infrastructure — I'd love to talk.
Partnering with a Sonoma County nonprofit to build a Trap-Neuter-Return (TNR) mobile app for managing the local unowned cat population. Owning the data model and core flows on a React Native + BaaS stack.
Seven-week intensive: shipped five full-stack projects including three AI team builds, capped by a startup collaboration for the final. Sharpened the soft stack — vision, branding, interviewing, networking — alongside Next.js, OpenAI, Stripe, Firebase, Cloudflare and MongoDB.
Built algorithmic trading models that fed the platform's market trend analysis, and integrated those models into the existing stack — moving heavy data processing onto Django ORM.
Supported development of internal tooling and customer-facing web properties — a first taste of shipping software inside a real product team.
Computer-vision pipeline trained on candlestick chart imagery to detect classical patterns in real time, then push SMS alerts via the Twilio API. FastAPI handles inference + delivery.
Secure, role-based REST API for product catalog operations with JWT auth, granular permissions, and indexed Mongo queries tuned for listing speed.
Led a 5-person team building a SaaS that auto-generates flashcard decks with OpenAI, gated behind Stripe subscriptions. Capstone for the Headstarter AI fellowship.
Movie recommender that scores titles by feature similarity and serves real-time recs from a lightweight Flask endpoint.
Led a small team building Python-based trading algorithms with full unittest coverage and matplotlib reporting.
Socket-programmed ATM ↔ bank channel hardened with RSA encryption and DSA signatures end-to-end.
MySQL-backed survey platform with a PHP backend for dynamic question logic and on-the-fly response aggregation.
I'm open to full-time roles, contract work, and the occasional weird side project.
Fastest path is email or LinkedIn — I usually reply within a day. If you're recruiting, please include the role and the team's stack.