June 2026 – Present
MLE Expert Writer
Mercor
Develop competitive, reproducible reference solutions for real-world machine learning benchmarks, with careful validation, leakage checks, and reviewer-ready code.
About me
Hi, I’m Helia — a software developer and machine learning engineer who enjoys turning messy, real-world problems into reliable systems and useful products.
I recently completed my M.S. in Computer Science at the University of Rochester. I’m currently developing reference solutions for machine learning benchmarks at Mercor while learning production engineering as an MLH Fellow in the Production Engineering program with Meta.
Outside of work, I love cooking, baking, traveling, photography, and painting. My time in the kitchen even inspired SmartPantry, a personal project that brings together two things I care about: thoughtful technology and good food.
- Artificial Intelligence
- Machine Learning
- Software/Production Engineering
- Cooking & Baking
- Travel
- Photography
- Painting
Where I’m growing
Experience
June 2026 – September 2026
Production Engineering Fellow/Intern
MLH Fellowship · Meta
Build practical production engineering skills through projects, technical collaboration, and guidance from experienced engineers from Meta.
April 2026 – June 2026
AI Trainer · Software Engineering Specialist
Handshake AI
Evaluated LLM-generated code and tests, developed golden solutions, and identified correctness gaps and missing edge cases.
August 2023 – December 2025
Graduate Research Assistant · Scalable & Data-Centric AI
University of Rochester
Built reproducible infrastructure for large-scale deep learning experiments, including distributed multi-GPU workflows, checkpointing, monitoring, and data-centric analysis.
January 2024 – December 2025
Graduate Teaching Assistant
University of Rochester
Led hands-on labs and supported 100+ students across Computational Neuroscience, Data Mining, and Advanced Algorithms through lectures, grading, office hours, and mentorship.
June 2022 – August 2022
Data Science Intern
VNPAY Solutions
Built web scraping, data, and fraud detection pipelines to automate risk analysis across 3,000+ merchant sites, created an internal Flask-backed monitoring dashboard, reducing manual workloads and improving efficiency significantly.
June 2021 – March 2022
Computer Science Research Assistant · Deep Learning Optimization
Franklin & Marshall College
Researched structured gradient pruning for faster neural network training, achieving 15–25% speedups in evaluated experiments and co-authoring a peer-reviewed ICPR 2022 paper.
July 2020 – December 2020
AI/ML Engineer Intern
Viettel Solutions
Trained and evaluated a computer vision model on more than 500,000 images, improving robustness through architecture tuning, data cleanup, and automated preprocessing.
What shaped my foundation
Education
August 2023 – December 2025
M.S. in Computer Science · AI Track
University of Rochester
Focused on scalable machine learning, data-centric AI, computer vision, human-inspired AI, and distributed training. GPA: 3.9/4.0.
August 2019 – May 2023
B.A. in Computer Science · B.A. in Business, Organizations & Society
Franklin & Marshall College
Combined software engineering and AI research with an interdisciplinary foundation in business and organizations. GPA: 3.8/4.0.
What I build and enjoy
Projects, Ideas & Interests
Coding & Research
Creating AI products, building personal projects, and exploring AI/ML/DL research questions.
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