Nafiur Rahman Khadem

Dhaka, Bangladesh

Hello, I am Nafiur Rahman Khadem, currently a PhD student pusuing systems research at Kahlert School of Computing in the University of Utah. I have 3 years of experience working as a software engineer at Optimizely.

I have great passion for problem-solving, I was a competitive programmer during undergrad and represented my university in many programming competitions. My proudest accomplishments are getting 9th place in ACM ICPC regional and 2100+ rating (top 4%) in codeforces before the era of AI-assisted programming.

My research interests broadly lie in:

  • Distributed Systems
  • Data-intensive Systems
  • Database Systems

You can find more information in my CV.

Education

...

University of Utah

PhD

Computer Science

Courses taken: Distributed Systems, Sustainable Computing

Aug 2025 - Now
...

Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology

Bachelor of Science

Computer Science and Engineering

CGPA: 3.80 / 4.00
Major CGPA: 3.95 / 4.00

You can find my grade for every course in my Academic Transcript.

Feb 2017 - May 2022

Work Experience

...
Software Engineer II
January 2024 - Present
  • Enabling active-active multi-region availability in our core services by migrating from Postgres to Spanner.
  • Developed a microservice to manage granting granular (entity-level) roles and permissions to users.
...
Software Engineer I
December 2022 - December 2023
  • Developed and deployed Experiment Collaboration which lets customer teams easily manage and collaborate on their experiment ideation, planning and results-tracking process on a single platform. It facilitated a 63% increase in experimentation velocity for customers.

    Used Python, React, Node, SQL, Mongo etc. to develop the product. Deployed the new microservice's Docker container to GCP Kubernetes, wrote infra as code using Terraform.
...
Software Engineer Intern
June 2022 - November 2022
  • Developed and deployed Experiment Scheduling Service which lets customers schedule experiments.

    Used Python, React, Node, SQL, Mongo etc. to develop the product. Deployed the new microservice's Docker container to GCP Kubernetes, wrote infra as code using Terraform.

Research

Decentralized Serverless Scheduler

  • Built a decentralized serverless system using libp2p.
  • Designed an algorithm that finds the best peer to execute a function and gradually increases the search scope.
  • Reduced cold start by half through mapping functions and nodes to a distributed hash table.

Deception Detection Using EEG Methodologies

Supervised by: Dr. A.K.M. Ashikur Rahman
  • Conducted thorough literature review compiling more than 15 prior works regarding lie detection using EEG signals.
  • Based on the insights of previous works, showed the existence of a spike in EEG signal from the midline parietal brain region upon recognition of a known object associated with guilt.
  • Conducted preliminary feature analysis on gaze data to differentiate honest and deceptive participants.
  • Provided our insights about unsolved challenges of the problem and potential future research directions.

Projects

Distributed key-value store

  • Implemented a distributed fault-tolerant linearizable key value store based on raft consensus protocol.
  • Increased read throughput by allowing backup replicas to process read requests without violating linearizability.
2025

Programming Knowledge Tester

  • Developed a web platform to test programming knowledge with MCQs and programming problems with automatic scoring.
2021

AI-game-LinesOfAction

  • Developed a single-player game against AI using minimax algorithm with alpha-beta pruning, also allows multiplayer game-play between human players.
2020

SmartStick

  • Developed a microcontroller system which makes a stick capable of signalling (using buzzer) obstacle distance from sonar sensor, ambient light intensity from LDR and communicating with smartphone via bluetooth.
2019

C-compiler

  • Developed a C compiler parsing a context-free grammar expressing a subset of C which detects lexical, syntax & semantic errors and converts the C code to 8086 assembly code.
2019

Checkers-LAN-multiplayer

  • Developed a LAN multiplayer checkers game with a multi-threaded server.
2018

Please feel free to visit my GitHub profile for more projects.

Skills

  • Programming Languages: Python, C++, Go, Typescript, Java
  • Database Systems: PostgreSQL, MongoDB
  • Web Frameworks: FastAPI (Python), React, Express (Node.js)
  • Cloud Technologies: Kubernetes, GCP
  • DevOps & Version Control: git, bash, Terraform, Docker, Github Actions (CI/CD), DataDog, ArgoCD
  • Data Science & Machine Learning: numpy, pandas, matplotlib, tensorflow, scikit-learn
  • Workflow: Agile Development & Scrum
  • Algorithmic Problem Solving: Top 4% max rating and solved 900+ problems in codeforces (profile)

Achievements and Awards

  • 9th in ICPC Asia Dhaka Regional Contest 2020 (out of 108 teams)
  • Optimizely SPOT award (awarded due to extraordinary ownership, proactiveness and performance)
  • Microdegree in AI scholarship from H&M (among 12 awarded students out of 1000+ applicants)
  • Dean's List scholarship, BUET (awarded due to academic excellence in last 3 academic years of undergrad)