Wilton, CT — developer platforms & applied AI

Zyad
Shehadeh

Software engineer working on developer platforms, build systems and applied AI tooling.

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now Software Engineer III · ASML edu B.S. CS · Univ. of Michigan stack Python · C++ · Go · Bazel · K8s · MCP reach GitHub / LinkedIn ↑
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About

I'm a Software Engineer III at ASML in Wilton, CT, where I work on the platform that 1,000+ engineers build on: Bazel build infrastructure, CI/CD with artifact provenance, and an internal agent platform of 15 MCP servers that I prototyped independently and the org adopted.

I studied computer science at the University of Michigan. Outside work I build local-first tools — software that runs on your machine, answers to you, and keeps your data yours.

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engineers on the platform I help run
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MCP servers built & operated
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faster builds via Bazel cross-compilation
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deployment frequency, under compliance
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Experience

ASML — Software Engineer III

2024 — present

Wilton, CT

  • Lead DevOps platform development for 1,000+ engineers: standardized Bazel cross-compilation and Docker image distribution (~30% faster builds), and run GitHub Actions CI/CD with gated approvals and artifact provenance.
  • Built and operate an internal agent platform of 15 MCP servers spanning GitHub, Jira, Confluence, Teams, Splunk, Artifactory and internal build systems — prototyped independently, then productionized org-wide.
  • Shipped a real-time Teams support agent (~40% faster responses) and a multi-model AI PR review bot (~35% less manual review effort).

ASML — Software Engineering Intern → Contract

2023 — 2024

San Diego, CA

Migrated an on-prem, low-latency data streaming platform to Azure with Kubernetes and Event Hub — millions of events per day — and owned its authentication, security, logging and monitoring.

LatchBio — Software Engineering Intern

2022

San Francisco, CA

Built Docker-based bioinformatics workflows supporting 100+ research runs per month.

UM Medical School — Research Intern

2020 — 2022

Ann Arbor, MI

Built R Shiny applications for metabolomics research and applied SVM, Random Forest and GBM models to pathway-level analysis.

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Selected Projects

Aether private · in dev

A local-first, agent-native OS layer: freeze and resume desktop sessions, grounded local-model answers, every effect behind capability tokens and human approval. Nothing leaves the machine.

agentslocal-firstsecurityMCP

Heddle

Version control for many hands moving at once — intent leases, stitches, and a green-by-construction fabric above git, built for teams of humans and agents committing in parallel.

gitdevtoolsconcurrency
View on GitHub

Arbor

Research code testing whether dendritic depth can substitute for transformer depth — shallow networks of deep neurons, benchmarked against conventional architectures.

ML researchPyTorcharchitectures
View on GitHub
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Education

University of Michigan

B.S. Computer Science · College of LSA Honors · Ann Arbor, MI

2020 — 2023
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Writing

Context Is a Budget, Not a Bucket

Jun 2026

Designing tool interfaces for LLM agents — the cheapest token is the one never emitted.

Signing Without Hermeticity Is Theater

Mar 2026

What “this artifact came from that commit” actually requires, and why a signature alone proves almost nothing.

The Dependency Graph Is the Real Artifact

Jan 2026

Blast radius, cycle ratchets, and critical paths — what a build graph tells you that the file tree never will.
All posts
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Live from GitHub

$ This terminal is real. When it scrolls into view, your browser calls the GitHub API directly — unauthenticated, read-only — and tails my public activity. The prompt at the bottom is a working shell: help lists 30-odd commands — live GitHub lookups, a small filesystem, toys, a theme switcher… and a few things help won't admit to.

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The Wall

$ A public guestbook, open to everyone — no login, no puzzle. The feed reads straight from github.com/zyads/wall, and your post travels through a tiny relay that can only ring a bell at that one repo, where a robot moderates it onto the wall. No credential ships with this page; you never leave it to post. And below the wall there is a second, quieter room — that one answers to a single word.

guest@wall:~ — cat wall/data.json
The wall is read live from github.com/zyads/wall — enable JavaScript to see it here.
zyad@observatory:~ — locked

Behind this door is the observatory — a second room, for the ones who look up. It opens to a single word, and the word is written across the top of this page.

“scattered lights, joined by imagined lines,
named by the ancients — one word for such a picture.”

stuck? the terminal one section up takes hint — it escalates the more you ask. (solving happens in your browser; the door itself is checked server-side.)