Austin, TX  ·  CS @ UT Austin  ·  May 2027

Zaid Marwat

I build and repair the layer other people stand on. Automation at Texas Instruments, test infrastructure at Visa, a container-ancestry bug in Podman, and a patent for a real-time thermal detection system.

zaidratify123@gmail.com US Patent US20240085134A1
zaid@utaustin: ~ type help  ·  ↑↓ history  ·  tab completes

$ cat why-i-build.md

It started with a variable called $L

The first program I wrote saved the output of whatever I had just typed in the terminal into a variable called $L, so I could hand it straight to the next command. It was not elegant. It taught me what environment variables actually were, and it started a habit I have not broken since: when a system makes me do something tedious twice, I go build the thing that does it for me.

Linux pulled me in from there, then networking, then CTFs. Everything I have worked on since is a larger version of that same script. A shell language extended in C so other engineers could drive simulations. Automation that absorbed most of a fab's workflows. A test hub with the schema and indexing decisions underneath it. An ancestry bug in an open-source container engine.

Different scales, same instinct: make the layer underneath more trustworthy so the people standing on it can move faster.

$ ls experience/

Where I have done it

Visa

Software Engineer Intern May – Aug 2026
  • Built backend services and automation tooling over high-volume financial transaction data in live payment systems.
  • Designed and built the internal test hub, owning the architecture decisions including database schema and which tables to index.
  • Shipped dashboards and logging pipelines for production observability, and carried on-call for what they surfaced.
  • Deployed ML-assisted transaction checking, plus an AI MCP server integration.
  • Python
  • SQL
  • Docker
  • Kubernetes
  • pandas
  • MCP

Texas Instruments

Software Engineer Intern May – Aug 2025
  • Automated 85–90% of the fab simulation workflows, cutting manual effort 10x.
  • Extended the internal shell scripting language, written in C, that drives the simulation tooling.
  • Error handling and job recovery that saved 150+ machine hours a quarter and $100K+ a year.
  • Built completion-monitoring services, carried on-call for job failures, and wrote the docs other engineers used to extend it all.
  • C
  • Python
  • Bash
  • Linux
  • Ansible
  • GitLab CI

$ ls projects/

Things I built because I wanted to

Brain-Computer Interface Wheelchair

published  ·  CBS

A close friend's grandfather was losing the ability to walk, so a few of us built a BCI wheelchair prototype in his honor. A real-time EEG pipeline in C++ and Python on a Raspberry Pi, turning noisy signals into movement, with ML classification tuned for real-world noise. Presented at the Advancing Healthcare Innovation Summit, featured on CBS, and published in the Journal of Innovation in Digital Health, Diagnostics, and Biomarkers.

It is the project I am proudest of, because it started with somebody specific rather than with a spec.

  • C++
  • Python
  • Raspberry Pi
  • NumPy
  • SciPy
  • OpenBCI

Thermal-Imaging Friendly-Fire Avoidance System

US20240085134A1

A patented real-time system that detects human silhouettes in live infrared camera feeds. The hard part was never detection; it was detection fast enough to matter, since in a safety system a correct answer that arrives late is worse than useless. I profiled the pipeline end to end and optimized the hot path.

  • Python
  • OpenCV
  • Embedded Linux

Podman

open-source contributor container ancestry

Fixed a bug in Podman's container ancestry logic, where a container reported the wrong ancestor image under certain conditions. It is also where my love of nvim started: jumping to the definition of a type and landing exactly where you meant to is a small thing that never stopped being satisfying.

  • Go
  • containers
  • nvim

Preference-Based News App

team lead Texas Convergent

Led a student engineering team building a short-form news app with a personalized feed driven by the topics each reader picks.

$ cat stack.txt

What I reach for

Languages

Python, C, C++, Go, Java, SQL, Bash. C and Python are where I am most at home.

Systems

Linux, virtualization, distributed systems, containers, networking, concurrency.

Infrastructure

Docker, Kubernetes, Ansible, GitLab CI, Jenkins, AWS, Git.

Practice

Profiling, debugging, on-call, technical writing, schema and indexing design.

Coursework

Operating Systems, Computer Architecture, Networks, Probability & Statistics, Linear Algebra, HPC, Virtualization, Neural Networks.

Editor

nvim, enthusiastically, with more plugins than is strictly defensible.

$ cat off-the-clock.md

Away from a terminal

Piano. I taught myself during my first year of college from those YouTube videos with the falling notes, practicing late at night in an empty dorm piano room so I would not bother anyone. Mostly anime soundtracks, Violet Evergarden and Your Lie in April. Hikaru Nara took me the longest and is still my favorite thing to play.

Fragrance. I am an officer of my university's fragrance club, which sounds like a non sequitur until you notice that a scent is a system too. There is an enormous amount of intricacy behind the formation of a single one, and what a person reaches for is quietly shaped by everyone around them. Preferences are inherited from a circle before they are ever chosen. You can learn a startling amount about somebody's world from what they wear.

Fantasy. Deep in Brandon Sanderson's Stormlight Archive. Rule-bound magic systems that hold together under pressure are, I suspect, the same thing I like about operating systems.

$ cat contact.txt

Get in touch

I am looking for work in virtualization, distributed systems, and infrastructure. Anything that keeps me close to Linux and a terminal.

zaidratify123@gmail.com Dallas / Austin, TX