Hello there!

I'm Awwab Mahdi.

Growing software developer and researcher, based in Ottawa, Canada 🍁.

If I'm not reading, you can catch me hiking, baking banana bread, or exploring new technologies.

Feel free to explore my projects, get in touch with me through my contact information, or check out my bookshelf. Thanks for visiting!

Experience

  • Software Developer March 2026 - Present
    Department of National Defence Canada 285 Coventry Rd., Ottawa, ON

    PythonAzure DevOpsLaTeXFigma
    • Built and configured a document augmentation pipeline using the Augraphy library for various document formats(DOCX, PDF, EML) and with OCR compatibility

    • Modeled, designed, and iterated on more than 20 high-fidelity dashboard wireframes and UI screens in Figma for the ShadowMaker application, including user workflows, logs views, and data visualization graphs

    • Wrote a technical research report for DRDC based on documentation for the ShadowMaker redaction tool, with detailed information on model capabilities, inference handling and diagrams

  • Data Science Developer January 2025 - August 2025
    Department of National Defence Canada 285 Coventry Rd., Ottawa, ON

    PythonAzureAWS SageMakerTensorFlowPyTorchNvidia Triton ServerGitLab CI/CDDocker
    • Implemented, trained, and tested an optimized 40M parameter document segmentation model(DocStructNet), with 97% accuracy on the DocLayNet and PubLayNet datasets

    • Used the AWS fmeval library, along with ECS, EC2, S3 and SageMaker to deploy a government chatbot with an evaluation pipeline

    • Reworked a Transport Canada Protected B application to replace AzureBlobService with a local version, and produced an exhaustive report on its functionality and security

    • Completed tickets in an Azure DevOps environment, interfacing with Azure GPU VMs, Azure Container Registry, and Azure SQL Database

  • AI Developer December 2023 - January 2024
    IRM Consulting & Advisory Remote

    PythonHuggingFaceOllamaExcel
    • Finetuned an open source LLM from the Hugging Face model library that enabled GPU costs to be reduced by 90%

    • Cleaned CIS Controls data from SCF, SOC II, CMMC and other cybersecurity frameworks

    • Used LangChain and HuggingFace embeddings to build a file-based chatbot that was able to effectively interact with clients and respond to queries

  • Mobile App Team Colead September 2022 - June 2023
    eWorx Technology Remote

    React NativeFigmaREST APIJavaScript
    • Studied Figma best practices and built several mock-ups to present to the client

    • Translated Figma components into functional React Native components

    • Used a provided REST API to integrate live data into the app

Carleton University September 2021 - February 2026
Cybersecurity Stream Honours Bachelors of Computer Science

JavaCC++SQLHaskellWiresharkLinux
Machine Learning · Reinforcement Learning · Multiagent Systems · Big Data Management · Algorithms · OS · Computer Security · Applied Cryptography · Networking · Real-Time Concurrent Systems
Co-President September 2024 - October 2025
Carleton AI Society Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada
  • Restarted the club from zero activity
  • Brought on executives, created a new constitution, and created club accounts and resources
  • Managed the development of the club website, carletonai.com
  • Ran 6 events over the Winter 2025 semester with 20+ attendees

You can also view my full Resume here.

Portfolio

April 2025 - Present
Developed a responsive personal website using Astro.js and GitHub Pages
AstroJavaScriptHTML/CSS
November 2025 - Present
Built a forecasting agent using OpenRouter to predict future events
PythonOpenRouterAgents
September 2017 - December 2025
Various projects built over my university degree. Main projects are: Art-Gallery-Social-Platform, 3004TermProject, Rl-reversi, SYSC3303_W24-G2, and MARL-comms.
JavaScriptC++JavaPython
init May 6, 2025

Contact

Get in touch.

Email LinkedIn GitHub