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PORTFOLIO / 2026

Assem Sohaib
Bensalah

AI Engineer, Agentic Systems · Founding Product Architect
PhD in Reinforcement Learning for Cyber-Physical Systems (Computer Science)

Applied AI engineer with 5+ years 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.

Proven ability to 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

Architecting an AI-native collaborative platform for scientific writing, built around agent-based human–AI co-authoring workflows. Designed tool-using agents and prompt-chained generation for drafting, revision, and refinement, supported by an integrated RAG pipeline using vector embeddings and semantic search over document context. Applied structured outputs and feedback mechanisms to improve determinism, citation grounding, and writing quality.

Agent OrchestrationTool CallingRAGVector EmbeddingsLLM APIsTypeScriptConvexTanStack

RELA(CS)²

AI ResearcherSep 2021 - May 2026

Designed and trained deep reinforcement learning agents (PPO, TRPO, A2C) on large-scale simulation environments, with a published cascading-policy framework evaluated across 100 simulation scenarios. Built end-to-end MLOps tooling on PyTorch, Weights & Biases, and MLflow for experiment tracking, reproducible runs, and automated evaluation across hundreds of training jobs. Authored a model evaluation framework - measuring policy quality, adversarial robustness, and convergence stability - adopted as the lab's standard benchmarking pipeline. Mentored junior researchers and co-supervised two Master's projects.

Reinforcement LearningReward DesignMulti-Step Policy EvaluationPyTorchMLflowWeights & BiasesPython

Verbly

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

Architected a production LLM-driven conversational system for real-time language proficiency assessment, supporting adaptive multi-turn interactions. Designed prompt strategies and stateful conversation orchestration for contextual coherence across long dialogues, plus an evaluation framework for conversation quality, contextual accuracy, and engagement. Integrated ASR and TTS pipelines with streaming LLM inference for end-to-end voice interaction at near real-time latency.

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

Rochemère Systems

Founder and Product ArchitectJan 2024 - Present

Engineered a full-stack construction management platform end-to-end, from data model to client-facing UX. Designed a Supabase-backed schema with real-time data synchronization across concurrent on-site and office users. Built resource allocation and reporting modules to improve project transparency and stakeholder communication. Owned CI/CD, deployment, and observability on Next.js / Vercel.

Next.js (React)TypeScriptSupabase

AutopilotVA

AI Engineer (Contract)Sep 2023 - Dec 2023

Delivered an AI-powered virtual assistant SaaS automating a majority of routine business tasks for early customers. Built multi-agent workflows using CrewAI and custom Python services for orchestration, database retrieval, and report automation. Designed end-to-end UI/UX for chat, calendar, and analytics dashboards to improve task completion times.

Multi-Agent WorkflowsTool CallingCrewAILLM APIsPythonTypeScript

Metrolabs

ML Engineer (Contract)Apr 2023 - Aug 2023

Built an NLP spam detection system on top of a fine-tuned BERT model, deployed as a Google Workspace add-on. Owned data preparation, model fine-tuning, and integration into the production add-on while leading a small cross-functional team. Defined evaluation metrics and held-out test protocols to validate model behavior before release.

PyTorchBERTNLPGoogle Workspace APIPython

Research & Applied AI

ACADEMIC

Completed doctoral research in reinforcement learning for cyber-physical systems, published in PeerJ Computer Science. The work is about 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