Hi! I'm Neil,
and I'm a recent MIT grad working on code & policy.
more about:
me
work
projects
resume
Hey! I'm Neil Malur, and I just got my bachelor's degree in Computer Science and Engineering from MIT! 🎓 Right now, I'm working at Meta as a Software Engineer on our core storage infrastructure, and I just finished up a research internship at the Indian Institute of Science's ARTPARK in machine learning for heatwave detection. I think a lot about how to build better systems in the world, and I use code to solve problems on the way there. In my free time, you can probably find me dancing 🕺, chatting with someone random off the street 👯, or figuring out how to fix my bike pedal 🚲 (again), but feel free to check out some of my work on the other tabs!
I currently work at Meta on our warm storage stack, serving traffic across Meta apps -- from AI workloads to product metrics. My work spans hot path latency reduction, agentic security, and reliability improvements for these critical systems underpinning Meta's data infrastructure. Before Meta, my most recent software engineering work had been at Nominal, a startup that focuses on automating the hardware test and validation lifecycle. At Nominal, I focused most on our data systems and processing, particularly on speeding up our file ingest pipeline, adding additional REST API compatibility, and augmenting our data computation offerings.
I got a taste of policy work at the United States Department of Commerce, where I used machine learning to help shape macroeconomic policy. My models of domestic economic character and distress influenced grant distribution to underserved areas of the country. At the DOC, I also worked on developing an in-depth case study of the metro Charlotte area based on original economic analysis.
I've also found myself teaching a lot lately. Last year, I co-taught a machine learning course to graduate students at La Universidad de Ingeniería y Tecnología in Peru, with a focus on combining theory with actionable projects and startup assistance. In 2024, I taught web design and machine learning to undergraduate students and young professionals in Jordan with Injaz :)
My current interests are in computer security and natural language processing, and I'm especially excited to work on projects that apply them to a policy context.
Here are brief descriptions of some projects I've worked on in the last 2-3 years!
DIE-BERT- As a final project for a Natural Language Processing course, we augmented BERT to accept prosody-related information, including relative spoken word length. We used forced alignment to gather this data from speech, modified BERT's input layer to accept our additional encoding, and fine-tuned the model on the results.
- With MIT's Climate and Sustainability Consortium, we designed and implemented a reinforcement learning-based architecture for polymer property prediction, particularly ensuring that crystallization would create valid conformations. We used a novel framework and strategies to reduce the search space of the folding of very long polymer chains, and our work was presented at an ICML workshop!
- As part of a research internship at the Indian Institute of Science, I worked on input optimization of weather data in anomalous heatwaves for leading weather models. I then tailored results to local South Indian weather patterns. My work was part of larger projects towards accurate heatwave and rainfall prediction in South India, where unpredictable weather swings are both common and often dangerous.
- For a final project in my Systems Security class, I secured a social media site by augmenting it to support WebAuthn 2.0 compliant security key login and to consistently fetch certificates from an ACME server.
- As a Social and Ethical Responsibilities of Computing Scholar at MIT, I worked with a lab to produce a timeline and analysis of the spread of COVID-19 misinformation using natural language processing on scraped social media data. We used both more analog NLP methods as well as pipelined LLM tagging on primarily Reddit and Twitter data.
- As a final project for a Computer Networks course, we designed and implemented an overlay network and congestion control mechanism to optimize multi-user file download on a shared network. Using partitioning of the file, consistent re-evaluation of link usage, and a custom pathing protocol, we achieved the most consistent and one of the highest performances for large files.
- To compete in MIT's Web Lab monthlong competition, we created a React-based site with hooks to generate recipes based on user-inputted ingredients. Once the recipe was created, the site would launch a custom game to go find all the ingredients!