// about me

Yusra Ashar

Software engineer · Los Angeles

// who i am

I'm a software engineer. I've been writing code since 2021 and hold a B.S. in Computer Science with a Software Engineering Concentration from CSU Monterey Bay.

I work on retrieval-augmented systems, event-driven backends, and real-time messaging. What I care about most is systems that are careful about what they claim to know — the difference between an answer and a confident guess.

Python Java Spring Boot React Node MySQL RAG C/C++ Docker A11y

// what i've built

Refactored a production notification system into an event-driven architecture on a client-owned codebase
Built a retrieval-augmented Q&A pipeline — ingestion, chunking, embedding, semantic retrieval
Led a qualitative study on trust in AI systems as team lead and primary author
Designed normalized schemas and SQL for data-driven applications

How I work

I read code before I change it. The bug I'm proudest of finding wasn't caught by a test — it was a notification type defined in the enum, implemented in the service layer, stored as a user preference, and triggered nowhere. Nothing asserts on a path nobody knows is missing.

What I'm working on

Tayseer, a retrieval-augmented question-answering system that answers from an authenticated corpus rather than a model's pretraining. Still building it.

Outside of work

Reading, swimming, Pilates, basketball — and writing that isn't code. Eighteen countries so far, and the notebook comes with me. I like to travel, but I like to come home too.