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PORTFOLIO / 2026

Assem Sohaib
Bensalah

I'm an AI engineer and founding product architect who builds agentic systems and production software.
I also hold a PhD in computer science, focused on reinforcement learning for cyber-physical systems.

I have 5+ years of experience building and shipping LLM-powered products and agentic workflows. Strong background in Python, TypeScript, and distributed systems, with production experience in RAG pipelines, prompt engineering, tool-using agents, and AI-driven UX.

I take AI systems from prototype to production, balancing quality, cost, latency, and operational reliability.

Agentic AI SystemsTool-Using AgentsAgent Evals & ReliabilityRAG PipelinesLLM-Powered Products

Selected Projects

PRODUCT WORK

Ziritex

Founding Product ArchitectJan 2025 - Present

Ziritex is a collaborative scientific writing platform where I design agents that help researchers draft, revise, and refine documents. Its retrieval pipeline uses document context, vector embeddings, and semantic search to ground the writing. I use structured outputs and feedback to improve consistency and citation quality.

Agent OrchestrationTool CallingRAGVector EmbeddingsLLM APIsTypeScriptConvexTanStack

RELA(CS)²

AI ResearcherSep 2021 - May 2026

At RELA(CS)², I researched reinforcement learning for power-grid resilience. I trained PPO, TRPO, and A2C agents and evaluated a published cascading-policy framework across 100 simulation scenarios. I also built experiment tracking and evaluation tools with PyTorch, Weights & Biases, and MLflow.

Reinforcement LearningReward DesignMulti-Step Policy EvaluationPyTorchMLflowWeights & BiasesPython

Verbly

Founding AI / Mobile Engineer (Contract, concurrent with Rochemère)Apr 2024 - Dec 2024

For Verbly, I built an LLM-powered language practice system that adapts across multiple conversation turns. I designed the conversation state, prompts, and evaluations for quality and contextual accuracy. Speech recognition, speech synthesis, and streaming inference support its voice conversations.

Stateful Agent OrchestrationLLM EvaluationPrompt EngineeringStreaming InferenceASR/TTSLLM APIsTypeScriptExpo (React Native)

Rochemère Systems

Founder and Product ArchitectJan 2024 - Present

For Rochemère Systems, I built a construction management platform with Next.js, Supabase, and Vercel. It synchronizes project data between on-site and office users and includes resource allocation and reporting modules. I owned the data model, user experience, deployment, and observability.

Next.js (React)TypeScriptSupabase

AutopilotVA

AI Engineer (Contract)Sep 2023 - Dec 2023

For AutopilotVA, I built virtual assistant workflows that automated routine tasks for early customers. CrewAI and Python services coordinated agents, retrieved database records, and generated reports. I also designed the chat, calendar, and analytics interfaces.

Multi-Agent WorkflowsTool CallingCrewAILLM APIsPythonTypeScript

Metrolabs

ML Engineer (Contract)Apr 2023 - Aug 2023

At Metrolabs, I built a spam detector using a fine-tuned BERT model and integrated it into a Google Workspace add-on. I led data preparation and model training, then defined evaluation metrics and held-out tests before release.

PyTorchBERTNLPGoogle Workspace APIPython

Research & Applied AI

ACADEMIC

In my PeerJ Computer Science paper, I studied reinforcement learning for cyber-physical systems. The work covers reward design and the evaluation of multi-step policies under adversarial and operational constraints, applied to power grid resilience.

That is the same problem as agent reliability. An agent is a policy that takes many steps, uses tools, and must stay correct when the environment fights back. I bring the measurement discipline from that work to production agents: scored evaluation sets, failure taxonomies, robustness under adversarial input, and convergence on a success metric instead of judging output by eye.

2026 · PhD DISSERTATION

An Artificial-Intelligence-based Approach to Enhance the Security of Cyber-Physical Systems

Doctoral research on reinforcement learning–based methods for securing and improving the resilience of cyber-physical systems under adversarial and operational constraints.

University of Oum El Bouaghi · Supervisor: Dr. Toufik Marir · Defended: May 2026

Education

ACADEMIC BACKGROUND
2021 - 2026 · DOCTORATE

PhD - Networks & Distributed Systems

Doctoral research at RELA(CS)² (Research Laboratory of Computer Science's Complex Systems), focused on optimizing power grid resilience through model-free reinforcement learning.

University of Oum El Bouaghi · Algeria

2017 - 2019 · MASTER'S

Master's - Distributed Systems

Specialized in high-performance computing (HPC) and cloud architecture. Graduated in the top 15% of the cohort.

University of Batna 2 · Batna, Algeria

Agents in Production

NON-PROFIT

Alif Initiative

Founder2025 - Present
STEM Education Accessibility

Led the development of a multi-agent AI translation pipeline to localize open-access STEM books from English to Arabic at scale. Implemented OCR-based document ingestion, followed by agent-orchestrated translation, terminology normalization, and consistency checks across chapters.

Designed workflows to preserve technical accuracy, formatting, and mathematical notation, with human-in-the-loop validation as the quality gate before publication.

Multi-Agent OrchestrationHuman-in-the-LoopLong-Document ContextAI TranslationOCRQuality Control

Technical Focus

SKILLS

Applied GenAI & Agentic Systems

  • MCP (Model Context Protocol) Tool Servers & Clients
  • Agent SDKs (Claude Agent SDK, OpenAI Agents SDK)
  • LangGraph (Stateful Graphs, Checkpoints, Branching)
  • Agent Memory, Planning Loops & Sub-Agent Delegation
  • Sandboxed Execution & Human-in-the-Loop Approval
  • Context Engineering (Budgeting, Compaction, Retrieval)
  • Structured Tool Schemas, Retry & Repair Loops
  • LLM APIs (Anthropic, OpenAI, Google)

Evaluation, Observability & Research

  • Agent Tracing (Langfuse, LangSmith, Braintrust)
  • Eval Harnesses & Prompt Regression Tests
  • Failure Taxonomies & Cost-per-Task Tracking
  • Reinforcement Learning (PPO, TRPO, A2C)
  • Deep Learning (PyTorch)
  • MLflow & Weights & Biases
  • Simulation-based evaluation pipelines

Frameworks & Development

  • LangGraph & LangChain
  • FastAPI & Flask
  • Next.js & React Native
  • TanStack
  • RESTful APIs, WebSockets & Streaming (SSE)

Infrastructure & DevOps

  • LLMOps (Deployment, Monitoring, Cost Control)
  • MLOps (Experiment Tracking, Reproducible Runs)
  • GCP (Certified)
  • Docker & Kubernetes
  • CI/CD
  • Supabase & Convex
  • Git & Vercel
  • Linux

Programming Languages

PythonTypeScriptSQL

Soft Skills

Product ThinkingArchitectureAgileProblem-SolvingTechnical WritingCommunicationMentoring

How I work

  • I favor simple systems that scale over clever abstractions
  • I do not ship an agent I cannot measure. Before a prompt or a tool reaches users, it has a scored eval set, a regression test, a named failure taxonomy, and a cost-per-task budget
  • I care deeply about reproducibility and long-term maintainability
  • I optimize for clarity - in code, data, and interfaces

Connect

GET IN TOUCH

I am open to AI engineering roles focused on agentic systems. Also happy to talk about collaboration or research. Either way, get in touch.

LANGUAGES
Arabic(Native)
English(C1)
French(B2)
German(A1)

© 2026 Assem Sohaib Bensalah