Rakan Abu Awwad

:: WORK_EXPERIENCE ::

Aug 2025 - Apr 2026

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Led development of a privacy-first Chrome Extension (JavaScript, Manifest V3) front-end and local Flask backend, implementing a zero-external-transmission pipeline that ensures sensitive data never leaves the user’s device
Engineered a hybrid ML inference pipeline combining PyTorch, Hugging Face Transformers, and TinyBERT with a regex-based rules engine for real-time sensitive data detection, achieving 93.7% accuracy
Built a 10,000+ synthetic email dataset using Faker and GPT-4 prompt engineering to address the scarcity of labeled sensitive email data, enabling supervised fine-tuning of TinyBERT for high-accuracy on-device inference
Fine-tuned and validated TinyBERT on a custom-built dataset, deploying on-device inference via a local REST API achieving <100ms latency

Aug 2024 - Dec 2024

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Contributed to an open-source project for students to post and review local places, serving a closed beta of 10+ users
Built a responsive multi-page frontend using Next.js and React with optimized routing, reducing redundant data fetching and improving perceived load performance
Developed a full-stack review system and JWT-based auth restricted to verified .edu emails via FastAPI and PostgreSQL, securing backend access and enabling verified user feedback

Jun 2023 - Aug 2023

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Designed and deployed 15+ RESTful API endpoints using FastAPI (Python), PostgreSQL, and Docker for inventory and order management microservices, handling 10,000+ daily requests across a 5,000+ product catalog with real-time data synchronization and highly scalable distributed backend architecture
Optimized PostgreSQL database performance through strategic indexing, query refactoring, and SQL tuning, reducing latency by 40% and improving system throughput, fault tolerance, and reliability at scale
Implemented JWT-based authentication and role-based access control (RBAC) across 10+ secured API endpoints using FastAPI Security utilities and PyJWT, enforcing data integrity and preventing unauthorized access across all production systems, reducing inventory discrepancies by 60%

#01

Architected and deployed a full-stack auto dealership management system using Next.js, Node.js, Express, and MySQL, implementing dynamic inventory browsing, server-side rendering (SSR), and real-time search and filtering across 100+ vehicle listings, serving 2,500+ real users in production
Engineered a secure admin dashboard with JWT-based authentication and role-based access control (RBAC) to manage listings end-to-end, integrating Cloudinary and AWS S3 for scalable media storage and deploying to production via Vercel with CI/CD integration

Next.jsNode.jsExpressMySQLJWTRBACCloudinaryAWS S3VercelCI/CD

#02

Built a Unix-like shell in C with job control and concurrent foreground/background execution, implementing POSIX signal handling and low-level system calls (fork, execve, waitpid) for process lifecycle management; debugged system behavior using strace and Linux /proc tools

CLinuxPOSIXstrace

#05

Built a privacy-first full-stack app combining menstrual cycle tracking with AI-powered task organization.
Designed AI workflows converting unstructured voice/text into structured tasks using Google Gemini and real-time speech-to-text.
Implemented cycle-aware scheduling with interactive calendars, phase-based badges, and Kanban boards.

ReactTypeScriptFastAPIPythonNode.jsExpressPostgreSQLPrisma