Vikram Balaji
Computer Science Student @ UW | Software Engineer
About Me
My name is Vikram Balaji, and I am a third-year student at the University of Washington studying computer science. My areas of interest include distributed systems, algorithms, and ML theory. In my free time, I enjoy reading books about technology, taking a look at engineering blogs, and watching math videos on YouTube. I am currently reading The Google Story and Distributed Systems: Principles and Paradigms.
When I'm not doing schoolwork (or leisurely reading about computer science), I love playing tennis, going to the gym, and exploring the beautiful outdoors.
Skills & Technologies
Programming Languages
Java, C, C++, Python, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, TypeScript
Artificial Intelligence
Computer Vision, NLP, PyTorch, Keras, TensorFlow, OpenCV
Cloud & Systems
AWS Elastic Load Balancer, Amazon S3, EC2, SQL, Microsoft Active Directory
Theory & Mathematics
Linear Algebra, Probability, Algorithmic Analysis, System Design
Featured Projects
Custom Operating System
A rudimentary operating system written in C that supports file management (opening, closing, duplicating files; reading/writing to files, providing metrics), process management (forking new processes/inter-process communication), expanding the stack/heap, and concurrent file system operations.
CIFAR Image Classifier
A deep learning model that leverages machine learning techniques (train/test split, multiclass cross-entropy loss, epochs, hyperparameter tuning through grid search, convolutional filters, etc.) to predict images belonging to the CIFAR-10 dataset. Achieved 69% accuracy despite limited compute resources.
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A website that uses Natural Language Processing techniques (Transformers, LSTMs, RNNs) to generate computer-written text and analyze the produced result. Demonstrates advanced NLP capabilities for text generation.
Education & Coursework
University of Washington
B.S. Computer Science | Sep. 2022 – Jun. 2026
Large-scale system design, fault tolerance, and distributed algorithms
Neural networks, optimization, and modern ML techniques
Algorithm design, complexity analysis, and efficient data structures
Low-level programming, memory management, and system calls
Process management, memory allocation, and file systems
Processor design, memory hierarchy, and performance optimization
Database design, query optimization, and transaction management
Professional Experience
Meta - Software Engineering Intern
June 2025 - September 2025 (Incoming)
Will contribute to the PyTorch Distributed team, focusing on checkpointing strategies for large-scale deep learning models. Work will involve improving reliability, efficiency, and scalability of distributed training workflows.
Amazon - Software Development Engineer Intern
June 2024 - September 2024
Designed and developed an API to provide order delivery estimates (early/late/on-time) for 175 million daily order events, to be used by downstream fulfillment teams. Resulted in an 8% reduction in average request latency, a 14% decrease in request failures, and 1.5% increase in an internal customer experience metric compared to previous implementation.
UW Electrical & Computer Engineering - System Administrator
September 2023 - Present
Develop and maintain infrastructure supporting 1,000+ students and faculty for educational and research use cases. Duties involve performing wide-scaled software installations, hardware component repair, and in-house server maintenance. Implementing code to support secure and scalable storage of sensitive information, including budgeting and records.