guest@pashabarahimi:~$

Pasha Barahimi

PhD Student, Computer Engineering — Distributed Systems / Networks

I'm a Computer Engineering PhD student at the University of Southern California, working on distributed systems, operating systems and computer networks. I picked up programming in high school and it turned into a degree — I finished my B.Sc. at the University of Tehran ranked first in my class. Along the way I've done model checking for concurrent programs at MPI-SWS, symbolic execution over Ethereum smart contracts at the University of Toronto, and cloud infrastructure and payments work in industry.

↓ cv.pdf

02 — education

Education

2026 — present

Ph.D., Computer Engineering

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

QED Lab

2020 — 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

Mid-Level Software Engineer (Full-Time)

Jan 2025 — Dec 2025

Okala

Contributed to the platform's payment system.
Implemented efficient algorithms to meet the real-time requirements of the system.

Bachelor's Thesis

Oct 2024 — Sep 2025

University of Tehran

Supervisor: Prof. Seyed Pooya Shariatpanahi

Analyzed Ethereum transactions in decentralized exchanges (DEXs).
Detected anomalies and optimized token portfolios to maximize profit.

Research Intern

Aug 2024 — Sep 2024

University of Toronto (Remote)

Supervisor: Prof. Fan Long

Developed an efficient Rust algorithm for the Heimdall toolkit to detect self-reverting storage slots — reentrancy guards and cache slots — helping prevent reentrancy vulnerabilities.
Solved the symbolic-execution problem of unknown storage values being interpreted as zero by supplying initial slot values to the engine.
Results contributed to "Enforcing Control Flow Integrity on DeFi Smart Contracts".

Research Intern

Jul 2023 — Sep 2023

Max Planck Institute for Software Systems (MPI-SWS)

Supervisor: Prof. Rupak Majumdar

Contributed to implementing the TruSt dynamic partial-order reduction algorithm inside Lincheck, a model-checking tool for concurrent data structures on the JVM.
Documented the challenge of uniquely identifying shared objects under garbage collection, along with possible solutions.

Junior Software Engineer (Part-Time)

Oct 2022 — Jan 2024

Sotoon

Contributed to Sotoon's cloud infrastructure and services across three teams.
Database team: completed mentorship, gaining skills in Kubernetes controllers and PostgreSQL management.
Security team: maintained and improved HuskyCI, a security test orchestrator, and contributed to the bug-bounty backend.
Integration team: developed features for the Announcer backend — automated announcements for Zoho, Slack and email — and improved the IAM service.

SRE Intern (Full-Time)

Jun 2022 — Sep 2022

Sotoon

Implemented an API gateway, optimizing service interactions and improving scalability.
Worked with Git, Docker, Kubernetes, Redis, Prometheus, Grafana, Makefile and Ansible.

04 — teaching