Omar Elrefaei

Taming Computers  •  Crafting Code

About

I am a software engineer specializing in high-performance computing and scientific applications. With a background in nanotechnology engineering, I combine technical expertise with practical software development skills to create efficient, scalable solutions for complex computational challenges. I enjoy working with teams who care about the usability of their software and are deliberate about their craft. I'm particularly productive working with Python or Julia, but I also have some exposure to C and Rust.

I'm available for full-time or contract work, contact me at el.omar.dev@gmail.com and lets see if I can be of benefit to your project.

Professional Experience

Habitat

Contract
QA Training for AI Coding Agents
Nov 2025 - Feb 2026
  • Built software-engineering benchmarks to evaluate AI coding agents against historical bug fixes
  • Translated PRs into coding challenges capturing explicit requirements and implicit constraints
  • Created Claude Code skills that gave contributors fast, local feedback before submitting their work

JuliaEarth

Contract
Software Engineer
Mar 2025 - May 2025
  • Built a parser converting geospatial reference data from WKT2 into JSON
  • Validated parser output against a JSON Schema to ensure data integrity
  • Vendored the dataset into the codebase, eliminating the need for a large dependency

National Science Foundation

Contract
Software Engineer
Nov 2024 - Dec 2024
  • Developed fine-grained benchmarks that automatically detected performance regressions in a quantum-information software package (QuantumSymbolics.jl)
  • Integrated static analysis and runtime validation into the project's test suite

Bank of Canada

Co-op
Software Engineer
Jan 2023 - Aug 2023
  • Contributed to rearchitecting the Dynare macroeconomic modeling suite in Julia
  • Implemented higher-order approximations for Dynamic Stochastic economic models
  • Optimized specialized matrix operations by interfacing with Fortran LAPACK
  • Developed custom graphical reporting capabilities for economic forecasting
  • Aided in deployment of a legacy Matlab codebase on a SLURM HPC cluster.
  • Drafted recommendations regarding the adoption of automatic-diff libraries
  • Improved the reliability of numerical routines through comprehensive unit testing

Neophotonics (now Lumentum)

Co-op
Optical Testing Software Developer
Sep 2021 - Mar 2022
  • Developed data processing tools for 200,000+ stress-testing results using C#
  • Achieved 80% reduction in ingress time by batching MySQL transactions.
  • Developed fail-safe parsing logic that preserved data integrity when importing noncompliant files
  • Automated colleagues' Excel workflows using Python and Pandas
  • Achieved 5x speedup in simulation workflows by parallelizing runs through Python API

Alolom

Co-op
Project Developer
May 2020 - Aug 2020
  • Developed automated Python source-code refactoring tools
  • Enhanced Arabic language support in Jupyter-Notebook
  • Deployed JupyterHub using Docker and Kubernetes

Open Source Contributions

Molly

Featured
Julia
  • Implemented a CUDA GPU kernel for SHAKE molecular constraints in Molly, a molecular-dynamics package (Pull Request)

DataDeps

Julia

Improved latency by adjusting type inference (Pull Request)

TableTransforms

Julia

Implemented the Rename table transformation (Pull Request)

Education

University of Waterloo


B.A.Sc. in Nanotechnology Engineering
2024
  • Capstone: helped develop a thermal-management system for electric-vehicle batteries operating in subarctic climates, using carbon-nanoparticle-induced resistive heating within a wax-based insulation layer

Technical Skills

Languages

Julia, Python, Rust, R, MATLAB, C#, C

Libraries

NumPy, Matplotlib, Pandas, DataFrames

Dev Tools

Shell scripting, Git, Docker, Jupyter, GitHub CI, GDB

Spectroscopy and Microscopy

UV—Vis, SEM, AFM, XRD

Biochemistry

PCR, Gel Electrophoresis, Microfluidics

Additional

SQL, Linux, CUDA/GPU programming, flame-graph profiling, Valgrind