Ralah Aaqil
Machine Learning Engineer | Data Scientist | Software Engineer
I bring product judgment, end-to-end technical ownership, and the range to move between user needs, system design, ML pipelines, frontend, backend, infrastructure, and production reliability. I turn ambiguous ideas into clear plans and durable products, collaborate closely, and do the unglamorous hardening needed to ship tools people genuinely enjoy using.
Experience
Mar 2025 - present
Vancouver, BC | remote
Founding Engineer
Riffle Inc.
- Own the platform architecture for a real-time collaborative browser-based music product, defining boundaries across Next.js clients, TypeScript services, PostgreSQL, WebSockets, CRDT documents, and media systems.
- Designed the application domain and state architecture, including centralized transactional undo/redo with scoped action grouping and replay-safe synchronization across complex editing workflows.
- Replaced hosted real-time providers with in-house Hocuspocus and Yjs collaboration infrastructure, implementing authenticated WebSocket sessions, document persistence, schema migrations, and reconnect recovery.
- Architected sharing and authorization infrastructure with invitation and membership lifecycles, granular public and private permissions, access-aware discovery, live revocation, connection invalidation, and idempotent collaborator management.
- Built end-to-end media publishing and delivery infrastructure spanning PostgreSQL data models, authenticated APIs, temporary and permanent object storage, browser and server-side MP3 encoding, validation, automated cleanup, and public delivery.
- Created a typed AI action platform with tool schemas, manifests, client executors, persistent conversation state, action-specific interfaces, and policy-driven approvals.
- Engineered the AI batch-execution control plane for dependency-aware destructive and non-destructive operations, isolated undo groups, conflict handling, stop and resume behavior, confirmations, failure envelopes, and telemetry.
- Built real-time voice and multimodal interaction infrastructure covering audio capture, playback isolation, voice ducking, transcription, session lifecycle management, idle timeouts, live transcripts, and voice-aware approvals.
- Built a provider-integrated creative services layer for stem separation, transcription, image and sample generation, writing assistance, and model-driven production workflows.
- Owned platform reliability and recovery systems spanning authentication repair, migration safeguards, WebSocket race-condition handling, permission-aware errors, board-state cleanup, and corrupted CRDT graph recovery.
- Built lifecycle communications infrastructure with behavior-based scenario evaluation, reusable templates, send ledgers, scheduled execution, admin previews, rollout controls, and one-click unsubscribe.
- Established product measurement and growth infrastructure across PostHog analytics, feature flags, A/B experiments, dynamic search visibility, and structured product and AI-tool events.
- Reduced platform complexity and latency by decomposing state stores, optimizing collaboration APIs, coordinating cache and storage locks, standardizing shared primitives, and eliminating redundant render paths.
- Translate ambiguous founder, user, and product goals into scoped technical plans, align stakeholders on tradeoffs, and sequence large initiatives into reviewable releases.
- Own technical delivery from architecture and implementation through code review, rollout controls, observability, incident response, and post-launch hardening.
Nov 2024 - Feb 2025
Bangalore, India
Software Development Engineer Intern
Riffle Studio Pvt. Ltd.
- Built and deployed API infrastructure for AI-powered songwriting tools spanning conversational assistance, lyric updates, autocomplete, rhyme generation, and configurable model selection.
- Improved AI output quality through prompt iteration, context and history management, response formatting, and prompt logs.
- Integrated the AI services with Supabase-backed context, WebSocket workflows, browser clients, deployment build systems, and production CORS configuration.
- Diagnosed and resolved routing, WebSocket, module-interaction, and browser-audio issues.
- Built movable components while helping transition the product to a new modular editor architecture.
- Shipped Moises-powered lyric transcription flows for turning recorded audio into editable creative material.
- Developed browser-based workflows for creating, organizing, and editing text, voice, audio, embedded media, and reusable assets.
Dec 2022 - May 2024
Bangalore, India
Research Assistant
CMR Institute of Technology
- Co-authored the IEEE paper "A Scheme to Enhance the Employability of the Differently-abled," published at ICMLANT 2024.
- Formulated course recommendation as a reinforcement learning problem using PPO.
- Modeled approximately 10,000 candidate profiles with a multi-discrete state representation and roughly 50 possible course recommendations.
- Translated an accessibility and employment challenge into a recommendation framework for identifying relevant upskilling pathways.
- Contributed across the research lifecycle, including experiment design, model evaluation, results analysis, and manuscript preparation.
Education
Master of Data Science
The University of British Columbia
2025 - 2026 | Vancouver, BC | Grade: A
Bachelor of Engineering, Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning
CMR Institute of Technology
2021 - 2025 | Bangalore, India | GPA 8.2 / 10
Recent Projects
Beyond the Balance Sheet | Kai Analytics x ACCJC
May - Jun 2026Python | pandas | scikit-learn | Quarto | Make | statistical modeling | clustering | reinforcement learning
- Built reproducable data cleaning and consolidation pipelines across student metrics and financial data reports.
- Prepared institutional health targets and evaluated financial score patterns across 115 institutions.
- Implemented and analysed the results of OLS, mixed-effects, ridge, and lasso models with institution-grouped cross-validation.
- Contributed peer clustering and interpretable decision-tree workflows for benchmarking colleges against comparable institutions.
- Developed reinforcement-learning-oriented decision support pipelines while clearly separating observed associations from causal claims.
- Produced reproducible partner-facing analysis with Python, Quarto, Make, documented schemas, and rendered reports.
DuckDB | Parquet | BM25 | FAISS | sentence-transformers | LangChain | Streamlit | S3
- Built a retrieval-augmented product-search assistant over 4.88M Amazon software reviews and approximately 89K product records.
- Designed scalable preprocessing and analytical storage with DuckDB and Parquet.
- Combined BM25 lexical retrieval with FAISS semantic search and hybrid ranking.
- Implemented S3 artifact loading, an interactive Streamlit interface, and swappable LLM answer generation.
PDF Malware Detection
Nov - Dec 2025Python | pandera | scikit-learn | Docker | Make | Quarto | GitHub Actions
- Built an end-to-end malicious-PDF classification pipeline covering data retrieval, validation, preprocessing, EDA, training, evaluation, and saved artifacts.
- Compared baseline, logistic-regression, and support-vector classification approaches.
- Added schema and data-quality validation with Pandera and integrity checks throughout preprocessing.
- Containerized and automated the workflow with Docker, Make, Quarto, and GitHub Actions, publishing self-contained reports through CI.
Vancouver Non-market Housing Dashboard
Feb - Mar 2026Shiny for Python | Plotly | querychat | Playwright | Posit Connect
- Built and deployed an interactive housing-planning dashboard with reactive geospatial filters, maps, charts, occupancy views, and accessibility breakdowns.
- Developed responsive Plotly and Shiny views for exploring non-market housing across Vancouver.
- Integrated a multi-provider LLM assistant for natural-language exploration of the underlying data.
csvplus Python Package
Jan - Feb 2026Python | pandas | pytest | Hatch | CI | Codecov
- Developed a Python package for memory-efficient CSV loading, dataframe comparison, string-value correction, and summary reporting.
- Implemented dtype downcasting and categorical and sparse representations with data-integrity safeguards.
- Added automated testing, documentation, packaging, coverage reporting, continuous integration, and release workflows.
Publication
R. Aaqil and S. P. Joy, "A Scheme to Enhance the Employability of the Differently-abled," 2024 IEEE International Conference on Machine Learning and Applied Network Technologies (ICMLANT), pp. 38-43, 2024. DOI 10.1109/ICMLANT63295.2024.00012
Technical Skills
Languages
TypeScript, JavaScript, Python, SQL, R, HTML/CSS, Bash
Product & systems
React, Next.js, Node.js, FastAPI, Supabase, PostgreSQL, Yjs, Hocuspocus, WebSockets, Zustand, OpenDAW, Web Audio, Tiptap, React Flow
Data & ML
pandas, scikit-learn, DuckDB, sentence-transformers, LangChain, RAG, statistical modeling, Plotly, Shiny, Streamlit, tensorflow, keras
Platform & quality
Docker, AWS, Vercel, GitHub Actions, PostHog, Quarto, Make, Vitest, pytest, CI/CD
Additional Activities & Experience
TELUS x TechNation Avalanche Risk Hackathon
Jan 2026
Trained a time-series forecasting model to predict avalanche risk and built a React based map demo showing predicted risk areas.
National Canadian Medical Datathon
Mar 2026
Normalized about 70K diabetes-readmission records and built a Bayesian modeling pipeline.
Peer Learning Facilitator
2021 - 2025
Supported over 60 students through coursework and peer-learning sessions.
Private Guitar Instructor
2024 - 2025
Taught about 10 students through personalized music curricula, using clear communication, tailored instruction, and individual progress tracking.