Elhadji Sall

CS student at UNBC building backend, systems and AI software.

I'm a Computer Science student (Minor in Mathematics) at the University of Northern British Columbia, graduating May 2028. I love making software fast and reliable, from C++ client code and Python backend services to container runtimes, storage engines and Gemini-powered agents. I'm looking for Summer 2027 software engineering internships on backend, infrastructure and AI/ML teams.

Currently: Software Engineer Intern at Microsoft (Activision), working on Call of Duty's login and authentication services.

Experience

  1. Software Engineer Intern

    Microsoft · Activision / Demonware

    May 2026 – Dec 2026 · Vancouver, BC

    Call of Duty login and authentication services.

    • Optimized the C++ game-client login state machine and retry/exponential backoff, cutting authentication handshake latency 15% and failed-reconnection time 20% for 90M+ players across PC, Xbox and PlayStation
    • Shipped Python REST features in the login and banning services: MFA fixes, per-title endpoint routing that isolates dedicated game servers from DDoS traffic ahead of a 30M+ player beta, TPM-based hardware-ban enforcement, and audit telemetry
    • Built a fault-tolerant fallback so clients never receive stale endpoints during upstream outages; rolled out services with Kubernetes, Docker and Helm across five environments
    • Python
    • C++
    • Kubernetes
    • Docker
    • Helm
    • Jenkins
    • pytest
    • Grafana
    • Kibana
    • Linux
  2. Software Engineer Intern

    UNBC Robotics Lab

    June 2025 – Feb 2026 · Prince George, BC

    Real-time coaching for an autonomous QTrobot.

    • Trained a TensorFlow 3D CNN on 200+ videos to classify 11 exercise types (92% accuracy) for an autonomous QTrobot coaching system
    • Built a C++ MediaPipe pose-tracking pipeline (95% accuracy, sub-100ms latency on live 30 FPS video)
    • Streamed live skeletal metrics through Django REST and WebSockets to a React front end, cutting app latency 19%
    • Python
    • C++
    • TensorFlow
    • MediaPipe
    • OpenCV
    • Django
    • WebSockets
    • React
    • ROS

Projects

Personal project

Wharf

A Linux container runtime in Python with namespaces, an overlay root filesystem, cgroup v2 limits and a Docker-style CLI.

  • Python
  • Linux
  • namespaces
  • cgroups

Case study Code

Personal project

Marconi

Redis from scratch: an in-memory data server in Go with RESP, TTL expiry, an append-only file and PSYNC replication.

  • Go
  • TCP
  • RESP

Case study Code

Personal project

Galley

A small GPT-style transformer built from scratch in PyTorch, with a workbench for inspecting tokens, attention and loss.

  • Python
  • PyTorch

Case study Code

Personal project

TranscribeMate

Speech-to-text in the browser, backed by a local PyTorch Whisper service that streams partial transcripts as it works.

  • Python
  • PyTorch
  • Whisper
  • React

Case study Code

Team project, HackAI

Bifocal

Flags abusive and manipulative messages with a multi-task classifier, and offers guidance through hybrid RAG with Gemini.

  • Python
  • PyTorch
  • FAISS
  • Gemini
  • Flask
  • React
  • TypeScript

Case study Code

Skills

Languages
  • C++
  • Python
  • Go
  • C
  • Java
  • TypeScript
  • JavaScript
  • SQL
Frameworks
  • React
  • Node.js
  • Django
  • Flask
  • FastAPI
  • PyTorch
  • TensorFlow
  • OpenCV
  • MediaPipe
Tools
  • Kubernetes
  • Docker
  • Helm
  • Linux
  • Git
  • Jenkins
  • Elasticsearch
  • PostgreSQL
  • Redis
  • Grafana
  • Kibana
  • AWS
Hardware
  • QTrobot
  • ROS

Notes

  • How Whodunit's Bayesian bisect handles flaky tests

    Treating a test result as evidence, not truth, and what that does to the search.

    Coming soon
  • Building a container runtime in Python

    From unshare to pivot_root: what a container is once you take it apart.

    Coming soon
  • What I learned writing a Redis clone

    Parsing RESP, expiring keys and replaying an append-only file in Go.

    Coming soon

Let's talk

I'm looking for Summer 2027 internships. If you're working on backend, infrastructure or AI/ML, I'd love to hear from you.