Islam El-Ashi

e: ielashi@gmail.com    w: imake.ninja

Work Experience

Cairo, Egypt
Nov 2018 - July 2019

Co-Founder at Elk
Built out the product concept and the software stack of Elk, a development board for developers to build fully
decentralized IoT devices. Featured on Techcrunch, AVC (Fred Wilson), Coin Desk, and more.

San Francisco, California

June 2015 - June 2017

Software Engineer at Twitter

One of six engineers to build out Twitter's ad-bidding platform for external exchanges.

San Francisco, California

May 2014 - June 2017

Software Engineer at TellApart (acquired by Twitter)

Lead the development of TellApart’s brand advertising product.
One of ve engineers who rebuilt TellApart’s ad bidding infrastructure, decreasing its latency by 3x and increasing
its throughput by 17x.

Cairo, Egypt
May 2013 - November 2014

Founder
Founded Diraya, an organization aiming to enhance the education system in Egypt and the Arab World. We
produced MOOCs targeting high school students in Egypt, with ten thousand active students at its peak.

Redwood City, California & Beijing, China

September 2012 - December 2012

Machine Learning Engineer Intern

Prototyped algorithms for extracting and disambiguating geographic data from text (patent pending).
Designed a classi er to detect food recipes for Evernote Food 2.0, with full support for 10 languages.

San Francisco, California

January 2012 - April 2012

Software Engineer Intern

Re-designed the product recommendation engine powering wish.com, increasing click-through-rate by 50%.
Built a Naive Bayes classi er to lter out o ensive and gender-speci c products.

Burlingame, California
May 2011 - August 2011

Software Engineer Intern

Designed a collaborative ltering system for TellApart's display advertising campaigns, increasing the company's
revenue by 10% and ad click-through-rate by an average of 20%.

New York City, New York

September 2010 - December 2010

Software Engineer Intern in Test

Enhanced the dependency resolution mechanism in JsTestDriver, a Javascript unit testing framework.
Automated the migration of unit tests in legacy frameworks to JsTestDriver.

Education

University of Waterloo Waterloo, Ontario, Canada

Bachelor of Computer Science September 2008 - January 2014
Enlisted in the Dean's Honours List of the Faculty of Engineering and the Faculty of Mathematics.
Four times elected as an academic representative for the Software Engineering class.

Massachusetts Insitute of Technology Brisbane, Australia

Certi cate in New Ventures Leadership April 2017
MIT's Global Entrepreneurship Bootcamp

National Taiwan University Taipei, Taiwan

Computer Science Exchange Student September 2013 - January 2014

National University of Singapore Singapore, Singapore

Computer Science Exchange Student January 2011 - May 2011

Languages

English (native uency)

Arabic (native uency)
Mandarin Chinese (intermediate uency)