guest@pashabarahimi:~$

Pasha Barahimi

PhD Student, Computer Engineering, University of Southern California

PhD student at USC, working on resource management and security of networked, decentralized, and agentic AI systems — mostly the parts of computing nobody sees until they break. Before this: first in my class at the University of Tehran, research stops in Germany and Canada, and a few years building payment systems in industry. Off the clock, films and 8-ball.

↓ cv.pdf

02 — education

Education

Jan 2026 — present

Ph.D., Computer Engineering

University of Southern California, Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

Sep 2020 — Sep 2025

B.Sc., Computer Engineering

University of Tehran, School of Electrical and Computer Engineering

GPA 19.39/20 (4.0/4.0) — ranked 1st among ~90 students.

03 — experience

Research & Work Experience

Research Assistant

Jun 2026 — present

University of Southern California

Supervisor: Prof. Leana Golubchik

Studying adversarial robustness of resource allocation algorithms in LEO satellite networks, with the Quantitative Evaluation and Design (QED) group; under review, listed under publications.
Developing probabilistic models of agentic AI workflows for resource management and scheduling.

Research Assistant

Mar 2026 — Jun 2026

University of Southern California

Supervisor: Prof. Srivatsan Ravi

Implemented and gas-benchmarked a Solidity hashed timelock contract for conditional payments, deployed on an Ethereum testnet.
The hashed timelock contract contributed to the arXiv 2026 preprint listed under publications.

Mid-Level Software Engineer (Full-Time)

Jan 2025 — Dec 2025

Okala

Redesigned the payment service to settle multiple orders with a single payment and implemented the redesign as sole engineer, rolled out with no downtime, no data loss, and no significant added latency.
Integrated four major payment gateways: a bank, two buy-now-pay-later providers, and a credit provider.
Owned and maintained the payment service throughout, peaking at 1,000 paid orders per minute.

Bachelor's Thesis — Analysis of Data from Decentralized Exchanges and Automated Market Makers

Oct 2024 — Sep 2025

University of Tehran

Supervisor: Prof. Seyed Pooya Shariatpanahi

Collected and analyzed 44.9M Uniswap swaps on Ethereum across protocol versions v2–v4, through a purpose-built GraphQL scraper feeding a SQLite store processed with Apache Spark.
Detected anomalous market behavior: wash trading, arbitrage patterns, bot-like repeated swaps at short intervals, and USD-value outliers.
Predicted hourly price direction for five actively traded tokens using XGBoost, LightGBM and random forests, reaching 62–66% test accuracy against a balanced ~50% baseline.

Research Intern

Aug 2024 — Sep 2024

University of Toronto (Remote)

Supervisor: Prof. Fan Long

Developed a Rust algorithm for the Heimdall toolkit to detect self-reverting storage slots — reentrancy guards and cache slots — enabling detection of reentrancy vulnerability patterns.
Resolved an ambiguity in symbolic execution where unknown storage values were indistinguishable from genuine zero values, by supplying initial slot values.
Results contributed to the ICSE 2026 paper listed under publications.

Research Intern

Jul 2023 — Sep 2023

Max Planck Institute for Software Systems (MPI-SWS)

Supervisor: Prof. Rupak Majumdar

Co-implemented the TruSt dynamic partial-order reduction algorithm within Lincheck, a model checker for concurrent data structures on the JVM.
Established that the approach was blocked by shared-variable identity on the JVM under garbage collection, and documented the analysis for future work.

Junior Software Developer (Part-Time)

Oct 2022 — Jan 2024

Sotoon

Database team: Kubernetes controllers and PostgreSQL management.
Security team: maintained and extended HuskyCI, a security test orchestrator, and contributed to the bug-bounty backend.
Integration team: built features for the Announcer service — automated announcements to Zoho, Slack and email — and improved the IAM identity service.

Site Reliability Engineering Intern (Full-Time)

Jun 2022 — Sep 2022

Sotoon

Implemented an API gateway improving service routing and scalability.
Worked across Docker, Kubernetes, Redis, Prometheus, Grafana and Ansible.

04 — teaching