Aimun Khan

Software Engineer, Debate Coach, Lifelong Learner

About Me

Cloud Security Engineer with strong SWE skills. Experience on both product and infosec teams, building features for customers and paved roads for developers. In my current role at Block, I actively write code daily to enhance our security services at scale. Having transitioned from a product-focused role, I possess a deeper understanding of our developers' perspectives and challenges. I'm looking to continue to grow both of these skillsets.

Outside of my career interests, I've been coaching high school debate ever since I graduated. In addition to other accolades, I've coached a state champion and multiple finalists in Texas, as well as a national champion at the middle school level. I've also coached 28 bids to the Tournament of Champions, including one of the youngest TOC qualifiers of the 2018-2019 season. I also recently founded an online debate camp. In the inaugural Summer 2020 session of The War Room, we taught 46 students, 11 of whom would go on to quality for the Tournament of Champions for the first time.

Beyond debate and mentorship, some of my other interests include piano, guitar, basketball, reading, and chess.

Resume

Technical Experience

Security Software Engineer, Block (Square) October 2022 - Present

  • Maintained services to surface misconfigurations and vulnerabilities for 12000 users' public cloud usage
  • Leveraged CSPM and DSPM tools to aggregate and generate risk and insights metrics for all business units
  • Headed campaign to reduce public S3 bucket risk by detecting real-time public reads of sensitive assets
  • Extended Golang service for streaming insights data to include Google Cloud findings and enrich with business context
  • Designed and implemented Looker dashboards to model insights into security risks using Snowflake warehouse data
  • Created secure Terraform modules for product teams to securely build and use cloud resources
  • Utilized Python, Terraform, AWS Security, GCP Security, Wiz, Dig, Lambda, DynamoDB

Software Engineer, Palo Alto Networks August 2020 - October 2022

  • Implemented OAuth 2.0 client credentials flow for syncing identity information to network and cloud security platforms
  • Aligned product, technical writing, QA, and UI teams on requirements for new onboarding flow for customers
  • Created integration between Cloud Identity Engine and new vendor directories using SCIM 2.0 standard
  • Aided in FedRAMP compliance by adding support for Azure Government to CIE
  • Implemented end-to-end real-time statistics pipeline for 5G data of tens of thousands of SD-WAN users
  • Optimized data migration at scale to be 10x faster for large frequently-accessed MongoDB collections
  • Wrote REST APIs for MVC app in Java and Python using MongoDB, Kafka, Redis, Nginx, Flask, Play

Founder, War Room Debate LLC April 2020 - Present

  • Organized debate camp with inaugural class of 46 students
  • Hired and managed team of 17 instructors
  • Designed camp curriculum and daily structure around remote learning
  • 11 of our students qualified to the Tournament of Champions, after 0 qualified the year before
  • Here is a link to our camp's homepage

Cloud Services Engineer Intern, Palo Alto Networks May 2019 - August 2019

  • Migrated on-premise security service to Google Cloud using Kubernetes to eliminate data center costs
  • Implemented Python and Node.js scripts as microservices to be more scalable
  • Utilized Helm, Nginx, Redis, MongoDB, RabbitMQ to implement microservices
  • Optimized real-time data processing using Apache Arrow
  • Won the internal InfoSec Capture the Flag event

Student Developer Fellow at Google, Contracted through Adecco January 2019 - April 2019

Software Development Intern, Fujitsu Network Communications May 2018 - August 2018

  • Implemented server-based multi-QEMU emulation via Docker Swarm
  • Designed Amazon Echo skill to check status of Jenkins builds using AWS Lambda
  • Utilized Agile development, DevOps practices, Docker, Jenkins testing, JIRA, Git

Projects and Research

Vocalitics

My senior year of UT, a group of friends and I developed a prototype for a startup. Vocalitics is an interactive meeting analytics tool that draws insights and takes notes on various aspects of a meeting. These insights include a comparison of the speech time of each participant using voice recognition, the dominant sentiment(s) of the meeting, and the sentiments of the meeting as they change over time. These insights are displayed statistically and graphically on the web-app. Additionally, Vocalitics provides note-taking functionality by performing speech to text translations, which renders a formatted and speaker-labeled transcript; automatically scheduling action items on Google Calendar by detecting key phrases throughout the meeting; and displaying the most frequently spoken words in a word cloud. By delivering all of these features into one seamless platform, the Vocalitics team hopes to drastically improve the quality of everyday corporate meetings.

Here's a link to a demo of the application

Terminal Live Winner September 2019

Citadel LLC & Citadel Securities partnered with Correlation One to host an invitation-only competition at UT. Correlation One designed a two-player tower defense game in which both players use limited resources to protect their towers while attacking their opponent's. Teams of students spent a day designing algorithms for the game, whose specific rules were unveiled the day of the competition, with the algorithms battling head-to-head in a tournament at the end of the day. My team of three took first place in the tournament. This was a very exciting competition that leveraged both my computer science and math backgrounds simultaneously.

Basketball Predictive Analytics

Some friends and I found a dataset that contained details of every individual shot taken in the NBA during the 2014-2015 regular season, including the distance from the basket, the closest defender, and the result of the shot. After extensive cleaning of this dataset, we created some new aggregate datasets from this individual shot data and analyzed how players match up against each other. We created a tool to visualize these matchups. Finally, we used this data to explore the hot hand phenomenon.

In addition to Scikit-learn and Pandas, this project used D3 to visualize our findings.

Here is an article detailing the project from start to finish Check out the force directed graph that we created to visualized player matchups

Music Taste Prediction Algorithm

I found a 280 GB dataset that contained features of a million songs. A team of my classmates and I did extensive feature engineering to reduce the dataset down to a manageable size. We then designed and implemented an unsupervised learning algorithm that takes a list of songs that an individual likes as input and returns new songs that the algorithms predicts the user would enjoy listening to.

We imported the data to a virtual machine on AWS. This project involved use of Pandas, Numpy, and Scikit-learn.

Check out an article explaining the project from start to finish

HackTX 2018 winner - Multi-Factor Voice Authentication Client

At HackTX, my team won first place in the Charles Schwab Security Challenge, as well as third place grand prize. Our goal was to implement a passwordless alternative to authentication. Our solution was to design a multi-factor voice authentication client. Our tool prompts the user to speak the answer to a security question, and then verifies the identity of the speaker using the recorded audio as well as the content of the answer. A prototype of this tool was demo'd during finals of the hackathon.

We used FireBase, Azure, and Tensorflow to implement this tool.

Here is a link to a demo of our project

Cloud Computing Research Paper

As part of a research project, a team of students conducted research on the significance of cloud computing. Our goal was to communicate the importance of cloud computing as a disruptive technology to both technical and non-technical audiences. We compiled this research into a paper detailing the technical description of cloud computing as well as its impact on technology and society. This paper were presented to a group of UT undergraduate students.

Here is a link to our paper

Inter-App Communication Research Paper

As part of a graduate class I took at UT, Mobile Computing, I wrote a research paper with a group of grad students. In this paper, we explored some of the differences in implementations of inter-app communication in iOS and Android development. Most research in the area of mobile computing defaults to Android as its scope of research, so we wanted to explore the advantages of including the iOS platform in these areas of research.

Here is a link to our paper

Freetail Hackers Spring Hackathon 2nd place - Wholesome Studio

We won second place at this Hackathon by making an anti-anxiety web app. Our goal was to create a tool for stressed people to use to calm down by giving them something to focus on with calming audio and visuals. For this web app, we created all of the audio from scratch and used paper.js and howler.js to implement the visuals and connect the audio to these shapes.

Some of the challenges in working on this project including working with unfamiliar JavaScript libraries and finishing an entire deployable application during an eight hour timeframe.

You can check out our finished product here

Web Scraping Registration Tool

For my own personal use, I designed and deployed a small Python app to text me via Twilio whenever a closed class that I wanted to register for opened up. This tool used Selenium and Beautiful Soup to scrape the UT registration page, using the Cryptography library to securely log in. This script was deployed on AWS in a Docker container.

HackTX 2017 - Fitbit Heart Monitor

At my first Hackathon, my team designed a Fitbit app and web app to communicate and text an emergency contact the location of the user whenever the fitbit detected a sharp increase in heart rate. We interfaced sensors on a Fitbit Ionic to poll heart rate data from the fitbit and store it on the web app where users could set up notifications. As my first Hackathon, I learned a lot about quickly designing and implementing solutions to a problem using unfamiliar tools. I had never programmed a fitbit app or used JavaScript before, so I had to quickly pick up these skills at the hackathon.

Embedded Systems Video Game

A friend and I designed and programmed an interrupt-based Mario style video game on TI TM4C microcontroller. The game was coded in C, and we created all of the pixel art for the game. We Implemented logic for pressure-sensitive jumping (allowing the length of the jump to be changed by the length of the button press based on a simple physics engine) and parallax background.

Leadership Experience

Debate Coach and ConsultantAugust 2016 - Present

  • Coached 28 bids to the Lincoln Douglas Tournament of Champions across 8 students, none of whom had a bid prior to coaching
  • Coached Texas state champion, Middle School national champion, third or better at every Texas nationally qualifying tournament
  • Practice with students weekly on presentation skills, research, adapting to different audiences, critical thinking

Software Design and Implementation Teaching AssistantAugust 2018 - December 2019

  • Held recitation sections for a Data Structures and Object Oriented Programming classes in C++, Java, Android Development, and Linux
  • Designed and led supplemental lectures on programming techniques
  • Implemented test cases for batch grading

Peer Advisor Jan 2019 - May 2020

  • Communicated with students as first point of contact for academic-related questions and course requirements
  • Assisted other students with long-term academic and schedule planning
  • Wrote Python script to automatically check prereqs of students' classes
  • Interviewed candidates for UT ECE Department Chair

First-year Student Mentor August 2018 - December 2018

  • Assisted social and academic integration of 15 freshmen into college atmosphere through weekly seminars
  • Workshoped with students on skills such as time management, study skills, and team building

Mathematics Department GraderJan 2019 - May 2019

  • Graded Linear Algebra homework of 120 students weekly
  • Derived answer keys independently

Education

University of Texas at Austin2016-2020

B.S. Electrical and Computer Engineering GPA: 3.5

B.S.A. Mathematics

Minor in History

B.S. Electrical and Computer Engineering2016-2020

Technical Cores: Data Science and Information Processing, Software Engineering

Courses:

  • Data Science Principles
  • Data Science Lab
  • Mobile Computing (Graduate)
  • Advanced Programming Tools (Graduate)
  • Concurrent and Distributed Systems
  • Algorithms
  • Linear Systems and Signals
  • Intro to Embedded Systems
  • Circuit Theory

B.S.A. Mathematics 2016-2020

Courses:

  • Probability
  • Quantum Information Science
  • Predictive Analytics
  • Mathematical Statistics
  • Stochastic Processes
  • Real Analysis
  • Number Theory
  • Linear Algebra
  • Discrete Mathematics
  • Differential Equations

History Minor2016-2020

Other interesting courses I took at UT:

  • Radical Hope and the Global Environment
  • Gender and Modern India
  • Jazz Appreciation
  • Guitar
  • Swimming
  • Weight Training
  • Personal and Family Finance
  • Entrepreneurial/Startup Senior Design

Skills

  • Python
  • Java
  • C++
  • JavaScript
  • NodeJS
  • Golang
  • Kubernetes
  • Docker
  • Google Cloud Platform
  • Software Development
  • Machine Learning
  • DevOps & CI/CD
  • Cybersecurity

Contact Me

Copyright Aimun Khan 2022