Azam Mohamed

Computer Engineer / Santa Cruz, CA / B.S. CE, UCSC 2023–2026

I build things close to the metal: operating system internals, embedded firmware, and silicon.

Finished the degree in three years with minors in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. Currently at jLab, tracing bad soil sensor readings across an entire pipeline.

Santa Cruz, CA West Cliff

Degree B.S. Computer Engineering, UC Santa Cruz, Sep 2023 to Aug 2026

Minors Electrical Engineering, Computer Science

Focus Operating system internals, embedded firmware, digital design

Research UC Santa Cruz jLab (ENTS), PICO compute cluster

Status Open to new grad roles in systems, embedded, and hardware

Resume Azam_Mohamed_Resume.pdf, one page

Fig. 1

ENTS data path, sensor to dashboard. My job is finding the hop where the reading stops being true.

Projects

9 frames · scroll →

1.01 Robot

Robot

Sluggers of the Lost Goal

Embedded C · ESP-IDF · HSM

Five weeks, $200. A PIC32 runs the state machines; an ESP32-C3 fans eight VL53L1X time of flight sensors out behind an I2C mux, streaming sweeps over UART.

Competition Source

1.02 ASIC

ASIC

Matrix Inversion ASIC

Verilog · cocotb · OpenLane · SKY130

A 2x2 linear system solver (Ax=b, Q4.4 fixed point) taped out through TinyTapeout. One shared multiplier and a 12 state FSM fit into a 1x1 tile at 50 MHz.

Taped out Source

1.03 Kernel

Kernel

Pintos Kernel Scheduler

C · OS internals

Replaced busy waiting with an ordered sleep list and timed wakeups from the 8254 timer ISR, interrupts disabled around insertion so the list is never edited under the handler.

6 / 6 tests Source

1.04 VGA

VGA

FPGA VGA Arcade Game

Verilog · Vivado · Basys3

A three lane endless runner drawn live to a VGA monitor. No framebuffer: every object answers "is this pixel inside me?" combinationally from the beam position.

No framebuffer Source

1.05 Firmware

Firmware

ENTS-tock

Tock OS · I2C · protobuf

Lab firmware I contribute to. Routed STM32 microlog output over I2C to an ESP32 so it lands on microSD, extending the protobuf schema without growing the RAM footprint.

Upstream Source

1.06 Concurrency

Concurrency

Thread-Safe Binary Search Tree

C · pthreads · Valgrind

Fine grained mutex locking for insert, search, and delete across many threads, hardened against races and leaks under sustained contention until runs came back clean.

Zero leaks No repo

1.07 Networking

Networking

Multi-Client TCP Chat Server

C · sockets · select()

select() based I/O multiplexing serving many clients concurrently on one thread, handling connects, disconnects, broadcast, and clean session teardown.

Single thread No repo

1.08 Bring up

Bring up

Embedded C on ESP32-C3

C · ESP-IDF · I2C · BLE

I2C sensor bring up, BLE HID, and RTOS tasks. The lab work that made most of the rest of this sheet possible.

Bring up Source

1.09 Hackathon

Hackathon

AutoSentiment

Python · TypeScript · SQLite · Ollama

NVIDIA x ASUS hackathon, four of us. Public sentiment aggregated from scraped news and social sources, every model call served locally by Ollama. We scripted job orchestration in the shell to keep extraction running unattended overnight across rate limited backends.

Local inference Devpost

Log

3 entries

Jul 2026 – present

Undergraduate Researcher

UC Santa Cruz jLab (Josephson Lab), ENTS Project

Trace the full ENTS data path, firmware through transport to the DirtViz dashboard, to locate where field readings are lost or silently corrupted before display.
Decode nanopb Protocol Buffer telemetry to verify packets survive transport intact, isolating failures to a specific stage rather than the pipeline at large.
Build a repeatable validation procedure so any lab member can certify a node's data end to end, replacing ad hoc spot checks that let failures reach production dashboards.

Jun 2026 – present

Undergraduate Researcher

PICO Compute Cluster, under Prof. Abel Souza

Configuring and testing the department's PICO compute cluster for Kubernetes research workloads.
Evaluating Incus system containers and VMs on Linux to build reproducible, isolated experiment environments, prototyping container and VM provisioning workflows.

Feb – Jun 2026

Rides Operator

Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk

Ran mechanical systems and enforced safety protocol for 100+ guests a day, which is a fairly direct education in fault detection when the safety critical system is standing right in front of you.

Notes

Most of what I enjoy sits at a boundary: where a sensor reading becomes a packet, where C becomes a scheduling decision, where Verilog becomes a tile on a die. The interesting failures live there too, which is usually what pulls me in.

Right now that means field reliability for solar powered soil sensing nodes at the UC Santa Cruz farm, a compute cluster for research workloads, and a 2x2 matrix solver I taped out on SKY130. Before that it was kernel threading in Pintos, a VGA game with no framebuffer, and a competition robot that only started working the week it had to.

Away from a terminal: cricket, table tennis, beach volleyball, and cooking for more people than I planned for.

Stack

Languages C·C++·Python·Verilog·Assembly (x86 / RISC-V)·MATLAB

Systems Linux·OS internals·concurrency·pthreads·sockets·select()·memory management

Embedded Tock OS·ESP-IDF·FreeRTOS·STM32·ESP32·PIC32·I2C·SPI·UART·PWM·BLE

Silicon SKY130·OpenLane·cocotb·Vivado·Basys3

Tools git·gdb·valgrind·docker·kubernetes·incus·wsl·ssh·neovim·tmux

Resume

PDF · 1 page

Azam Mohamed — Resume

Software and systems

The same document I send to employers: education, the research and cluster roles, and four projects written out at length.

View Download

Contact

Email azamoham@ucsc.edu

GitHub github.com/Azzu-bear

LinkedIn azam-mohamed-718780295

Located Santa Cruz, California

If you have something running close to the metal and it is behaving strangely, that is the kind of message I answer fastest.