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Awsaf Alam
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AI Product Engineer · R&D Lead

I turn messy workflows into AI products people can use.

I'm Awsaf, R&D Lead at Sourcy and a former founding engineer. I work across product decisions and hands-on engineering: turning ambiguous requirements into usable workflows, testing them against real cases, and improving what happens after launch.

Explore selected workResume

Available for consulting and freelance AI product work. awsafalam@gmail.com

Your dataResearchExtractActChecksYour app
How I usually build it: your data goes to a few focused agents, every result is checked, and only then does it reach your app.
  • 8+ years engineering
  • MIT Solve winner, 2019
  • MSc in CSE, BUET
  • Dhaka, GMT+6, works remote

Current work

R&D Lead at Sourcy since January 2026

RequestSupplier ASimulatedSupplier CSupplier Dfollow-up!ticketPersongoal coveragePriceLead timeMaterial
Illustrative. Four sample conversations: two finish, one goes quiet and gets a follow-up, one hits a blocker and goes to a person.

Supplier conversations that can be inspected and improved

An agent that talks to suppliers is only useful if you can see why a conversation went the way it did, and fix it.

We rebuilt the supplier-conversation agent around explicit goals, conversation history and human escalation, with end-to-end tracing and regression tests behind it. Early conversations showed that better replies drew more complex supplier questions. That changed which failure cases to handle before a wider rollout: for example, the agent has to stop pushing once a supplier declines.

R&D Lead · agent implementation and evaluation. Teammates handled messaging transport and infrastructure, integration and product input.

Tested against real supplier conversations, with failure cases documented.

Read the case study

How I approach product problems

  1. Understand the workflow

    Watch where people get stuck and separate missing information from technical limitations.

  2. Build the smallest useful version

    Put something testable into the existing workflow.

  3. Observe real behaviour

    Review user feedback, failures and human intervention.

  4. Improve or change direction

    Make the next investment based on what the evidence shows.

Then back to the first step, with what the last round showed.

Research

Published at FSE 2026

ToxiShield: Promoting Inclusive Developer Communication through Real-Time Toxicity Filtering

First author. A browser extension that catches toxic code review comments on GitHub before they're posted, explains why, and suggests a polite rewrite.

This code is garbage. Did you even test it?

Flagged: insulting tone

Suggested: This needs another pass. Could you add a test for this case?

Illustrative example, not from the paper's data.
98%
accuracy at spotting toxic review comments
97%
F1 score for the same filter
95.27%
style-transfer accuracy for the polite rewrites
  • How it works, with a demo
  • Paper
  • arXiv
  • Code

Writing

All posts

Earlier work

Tech Lead at Sourcy, 2024 to 2025

  • 90%

    Smart catalog search

    Cut customer wait times for sourcing results by 90% through intelligent search and proactive data scraping.

  • 30%

    Scaling and reliability

    Scaled infrastructure to support a 30% month-over-month increase in transaction volume. Reduced platform downtime by 25% after introducing monitoring, and cut database query response time by 40% through normalization, indexing and caching.

  • AI social media insights

    A TikTok and Instagram insights platform, powered by AI agents and data pipelines that keep running.

I'm most useful when the problem is not fully specified yet.

Sometimes the answer is a better model. Sometimes it's a clearer input, a simpler interface, or a human decision the system should not pretend to make.

Consulting and freelance

AI agents and data pipelines, backend architecture and scaling, full-stack Next.js and React, scraping and automation. Tell me about the workflow and where it's stuck.

Book a 30-min call
  • GitHub
  • LinkedIn
© 2026 Awsaf Alam