Zain Altaf

I'm a Computer Science graduate from the University of Leicester with nine years of programming experience and a particular focus on cloud systems, data analytics, and scalable architecture.

I have worked with multiple languages (such as Python, Java, JS, SQL, and more) while utilising industry-standard tools and techniques to design, implement, and showcase a variety of projects. Relevant modules have given me an understanding of pivotal concepts such as REST API design, database and domain modelling, front-end UI design and integration, Agile software development methodologies, and more.

Aligning the core ideas of these modules, my final-year dissertation put them into practice by designing a simulation engine to evaluate carbon-aware workload scheduling policies against real HPC trace data at scale.

Professionally, I've worked in QA on a live production app serving thousands of users, and collaborated with IBM as Events Coordinator for the UoL Computer Science Society on technical events and a 100-person hackathon.

What drives me is the conviction that well-engineered code is a durable asset — written with enough precision and structure today that it remains a reliable resource as requirements, scale, and circumstances inevitably shift. I'm drawn to architectures that anticipate future needs via redundancy or elastic compute models which make cloud systems resilient by design, as well as the predictive rigour that makes machine learning and big data projects genuinely useful at scale. I enjoy the artistic nature of balancing accurate and robust future-proof solutions while delivering fundamental features in the present that satisfy end-user requirements.