Raahim.

Raahim A Samad Poonawala

AI Research Engineer | VLM & LLM Specialist | Full-Stack Startup Architect

Overview

CS Graduate from LUMS specializing in **Deep Learning** and **Autonomous Systems**. From architecting **GRPO-based frameworks** for LLM generalization to building **Alzheimer's detection VLMs**, I bridge the gap between high-level research and production-ready engineering. At **onBeacon**, I scaled customer intelligence by integrating **RAG workflows** and **LLM verification** into a full-stack environment. I thrive on solving complex engineering hurdles, whether it's stabilizing training loops for **GPT-like models** from scratch or optimizing satellite imagery pipelines to outperform state-of-the-art benchmarks by **29.39 dB PSNR** (winning the Best Project Award). I am driven by the goal of making AI systems more **traceable, reliable, and impactful** for end-users.

Karachi

Experience

Present

INTERNSHIP

Research Intern (Medical VLM)

Tibbling Technologies

Researching multimodal vision-language models for clinical Alzheimer's detection.

•Source and reconcile medical imaging datasets, preprocessing them into usable multimodal formats.

•Fine-tune and evaluate vision-language models for Alzheimer's detection.

•Establish baselines for model behavior across Brain MRI benchmarks and transition the project into a systematic, reproducible pipeline for clinical evaluation.

VLMBrain MRIMedical ImagingMultimodal LearningFine-tuningPython

May 2024

WORK

Web Developer & Machine Learning Engineer

Independent Work

Leading independent research and development across machine learning, full-stack AI, and financial intelligence.

•Developing a RAG-driven financial intelligence platform for PSX equities, integrating real-time market data and AI agents for automated analysis.

•Built and optimized GPT-like architectures (Wavenet, Bigram) from scratch, resolving vanishing gradient issues to stabilize training loops.

•Implemented a 96% accurate ViT-based food classifier trained on 100k+ images.

•Improved platform efficiency by 70% for the Kissan-Dost IoT integration using FastAPI and RAG pipelines.

PyTorchMERN StackThree.jsFastAPIRAG pipelinesORMsIoTViT

Jun 2026 – Aug 2026

WORK

AI Software Engineering Intern

onBeacon

Engineering RAG workflows and full-stack AI integrations for product feedback.

•Integrated Granola and Notion through MCP/APIs for automated feedback ingestion.

•Built RAG workflows linking product-flow and UI audits to customer evidence using OpenAI and Anthropic for high-fidelity verification.

•Optimized system reliability by migrating core workflows to a PostgreSQL, Redis, and Celery stack while contributing to full-stack development in FastAPI and Next.js.

FastAPIPostgreSQLRedisCeleryNext.jsFlaskOpenAIAnthropicRAGAPIs

May 2024 – Dec 2025

INTERNSHIP

Research Intern

CsALT LUMS

Lahore, Pakistan

Researching medical NLP and dataset curation for the Urdu language.

•Developed custom Python scripts to process and annotate a **10,000+** entry Urdu dataset.

•Applied parameter-efficient fine-tuning (LoRA, prefix tuning) to medical models via HuggingFace, establishing performance benchmarks for 'Darcheeni'.

Key Achievements

→ surf

PythonWeb scrapingLoRAPrefix tuningHuggingFace

Jun 2025 – Aug 2025

INTERNSHIP

DL Intern

Maanz-AI

hybrid

Focused on deep learning implementations for medical diagnostics.

•Implemented data preprocessing and training loops for the PRNet architecture in PyTorch, achieving a peak **96.94%** accuracy in radiography disease classification.

PyTorchPRNetRadiography disease classification

Jun 2025 – Jul 2025

WORK

Research Assistant

Water Informatics of Technologies Summer Mentorship Program

Researching satellite imagery upscaling using advanced deep learning models.

•Developed deep learning models for satellite imagery upscaling, achieving **29.39 dB PSNR (3x)** and **22 dB PSNR (9x)** on SMAP data, outperforming SOTA benchmarks.

•Received the **Best Project Award** for technical excellence and impact.

PythonPyTorchDeep LearningDiffusion ModelsSMAP satellite data

Nov 2024 – May 2025

WORK

Head of Game development

Quran Scape

remote

Led game development and AI content strategies for educational platforms.

•Led a team of **4** developers in the end-to-end design and development of **30+** interactive educational games based on Quranic themes.

•Increased content reach and engagement by **~80%** through the execution of AI-driven video content and SEO strategies.

AI-driven video contentSEO

Aug 2024 – Dec 2024

WORK

Business Development Team Leader

AIESEC in LUMS

Lahore, Pakistan

Managed corporate relations and financial education initiatives.

•Managed corporate partnerships and financial initiatives, securing over **PKR 500,000** in donations and benefiting **80+** staff members with financial education.

Aug 2024 – Dec 2024

WORK

IT Director

SPADES & LUMS Religious Society

Lahore, Pakistan

Directed technical optimizations and IT operations for religious and social societies.

•Directed IT operations and technical optimizations, achieving a **70%** increase in traffic and **90%** improvement in load performance through SEO and UI/UX enhancements.

SEOUI/UX

Jul 2024 – Aug 2024

INTERNSHIP

AI intern

Rare Sense Inc.

remote

Optimized computer vision workflows for large-scale fashion datasets.

•Utilized Adobe tools for high-precision annotation and preparation of a **1,000+** image dataset.

•Optimized YOLOv10 workflows for large-scale object detection, processing **10,000+** fashion images across **5+** international brands.

Adobe toolsYOLOv10Object Detection

Project Portfolio

ACADEMIC

Present

Dynamic Programming and Reinforcement Learning (CS6314) - Course Project

Developer

Developed a curriculum-trained autonomous multi-agent driving agent using Python, PyTorch, OpenAI Gym and MetaDrive, outperforming non-curriculum baselines across complex traffic scenarios. Achieved up to ~45% improvement in mean reward and ~22% higher task completion rates, while reducing training time by ~25-30% through staged learning.

PythonPyTorchOpenAI GymMetaDrive

PROFESSIONAL

Present

Kahani Project

Research Intern

Built and pre-processed 10k+ entries Urdu dataset for the "Kahani" project using Python-based web scraping and data cleaning scripts.

PythonWeb scraping

PERSONAL

Present

ViT-based food classifier

Developer

Implemented a 96% accurate ViT-based food classifier using PyTorch, trained on 100k+ images across 101 categories.

PyTorchVision Transformers (ViT)

PERSONAL

Present

Kissan-Dost platform

Developer

Optimized the Kissan-Dost platform using FastAPI, RAG pipelines, ORMs, and real-time IoT data integration, improving platform efficiency by 70%.

FastAPIRAG pipelinesORMsIoT

PERSONAL

Present

Advanced Topics in Machine Learning (CS-6304) - Course Project

Researcher/Developer

Proposed RewardMaxxing, a novel GRPO-based framework integrating token-level memorization penalties via the STIM framework. While the project faced an inference database bottleneck that limited final benchmarking, the architecture was designed to improve LLM generalization under distribution shifts.

PythonPyTorchGRPOSTIM framework

PERSONAL

Present

Darcheeni

Research Intern

Fine-tuned and benchmarked on 7+ hours of medical data using LoRA and prefix tuning techniques for "Darcheeni."

HuggingFaceLoRAPrefix tuningPython

PERSONAL

Present

GPT-like models from scratch

Developer

Built GPT-like models from scratch (bigram, wavenet, makemore, micrograd), gaining deep architectural insight.

PythonBigramWavenetMakemoreMicrograd

PERSONAL

Present

PSX Financial Intelligence Platform

A personal financial-intelligence platform focused on PSX equities, combining price/volume histories, company fundamentals, and news filings with RAG-driven AI agents for stock analysis.

PythonRAGAI AgentsFinancial Analytics

PERSONAL

Present

DeployTeach

Machine Learning Engineer

A privacy-preserving classroom analytics system designed to study teacher pedagogy without relying on cameras or fixed sensing infrastructure. The system combined instructor location/movement tracking with speech diarization to understand where the teacher moved, when they were speaking, and how those patterns related to classroom interaction.

Silero VADsherpa-onnxpyannotePython

PERSONAL

Present

DVLM Latent-Reasoning Project

Research-focused vision-language modeling project exploring whether reasoning could be improved through latent/internal representations rather than relying only on explicit chain-of-thought style outputs. The work involved building evaluation pipelines, running ablations across different model/training setups, and experimenting with value-model and PPO-style components to study reasoning quality and generalization.

Vision-Language Modeling (VLM)PPOValue-modelPythonEvaluation pipelines

Education

Sep 2023 – 2027

BSc (Hons.) Computer Science

Lahore University of Management ScienceSpecialization in Computer Science

GPA: 3.76

Relevant Coursework

Internet of ThingsDeep Vision Language ModelsSoftware EngineeringAlgorithmsData Structures

Societies & Activities

AIESEC in LUMSSPADESLUMS Religious Society

Impact & Recognition

Awards

WiT SMP 2025 · 2025

Best Project Award

Awarded for the coarse-to-fine super-resolution system for soil moisture prediction.

CWMUN'19 · 2019

Best Delegation Award

Won for Pakistan as a part of the WHO committee.

Lahore University of Management Science

Dean's Honours List

Awarded for a 3.6+ GPA for Freshman and Sophomore year.

Professional Certifications

Google · 2023

Fundamentals of Digital Marketing

edX · 2023

CS50X: Introduction to Artificial Intelligence (and its Neural Networks)

Microsoft · 2025

AZ900 & AZ104: fundamentals and associate developer of Microsoft Azure

Expires Aug 2025

Social Impact & Activities

Aug 2024 – Dec 2024

AIESEC in LUMS

Business Development Team Leader

Organized "Smile for LUMS" in partnership with HBL, benefiting 80+ staff members with donations and financial education

EngagementORGANIZER

Skills & Interests

Python

TECHNICAL

Reinforcement Learning

TECHNICAL

Curriculum RL

TECHNICAL

Transformers

TECHNICAL

CNNs

TECHNICAL

Vision Transformers

TECHNICAL

PyTorch

TECHNICAL

Diffusion Models

TECHNICAL

Pandas

TECHNICAL

Numpy

TECHNICAL

Q-learning

TECHNICAL

Policy Gradients

TECHNICAL

HuggingFace

TECHNICAL

scikit-learn

TECHNICAL

MERN Stack

TECHNICAL

Three.js

TECHNICAL

SQL

TECHNICAL

Azure

TOOL

YOLOv10

TECHNICAL

SEO

TECHNICAL

FastAPI

TECHNICAL

MATLAB

TECHNICAL

Areas of Expertise

Leadership

Community Service

Project Management

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