Open to opportunities

Mahmoud Zaher

@mahmoudzaher

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Research-driven deep learning engineer focused on interpretability and speech synthesis.

Egypt

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What I'm looking for

I seek research-focused roles or industry positions tackling interpretability, TTS, and ML systems, where I can drive high-impact, novel solutions and collaborate across teams.

I am a research-driven deep learning engineer passionate about neural network interpretability and speech synthesis, with hands-on experience fine-tuning GlowTTS and VITS for Arabic TTS and investigating how neural representations and saliency patterns evolve during training. I have led projects that combine rigorous data cleaning, feature selection, and model regularization to achieve strong predictive performance across domains.

I hold a BSc in Computer and Control Systems Engineering and have completed intensive training in full-stack development and deep learning; I co-founded ActveX, fine-tuned YOLOv8m-pose for real-time posture correction, and delivered a graduation project that achieves under 15% CER for Arabic text extraction and improved Arabic TTS alignment. I seek high-impact research or industry roles that push the boundaries of model understanding and real-world speech applications.

Experience

Work history, roles, and key accomplishments

Current

Research Intern

Current

The University of Queensland

Aug 2025 - Present (4 months)

Conducting research on how neural representations and saliency patterns evolve during training to uncover mechanisms behind learning and generalization in deep networks.

Deep Learning PyTorch Representation Learning Experiment Design

Full Stack Developer

Information Technology Institute

Jul 2025 - Dec 2025 (5 months)

Completed an intensive full-stack program building and deploying Django REST + React applications, implementing CI/CD with Jenkins and Docker and delivering data-driven dashboards and APIs.

Django React Django REST Framework PostgreSQL Docker Jenkins CI CD Linux

R&D Freelance

Independent

Jul 2024 - Dec 2024 (5 months)

Modeled naval propulsion maintenance costs using operational CODLAG data, deriving cost proxies and applying PCA, VIF-based feature selection, and regression/ensemble models to forecast maintenance costs with high accuracy.

Regression Modeling Data Cleaning Python

Research Intern

ReachSci

Oct 2023 - Apr 2024 (6 months)

Led a project improving Arabic TTS by fine-tuning GlowTTS and VITS, assessing SOTA methods and enhancing alignment and end-to-end synthesis quality.

Text To Speech GlowTTS Speech Synthesis Fine Tuning PyTorch Model Evaluation

Academic Tutor

Course Hero

Jan 2021 - Mar 2023 (2 years 2 months)

Provided personalized academic support to students, improving understanding and performance across courses and contributing educational content within a large educator community.

Tutoring Educational Content Communication Subject Matter Expertise

Mobile Development Intern

Information Technology Institute

Jan 2023 - Feb 2023 (1 month)

Built cross-platform mobile applications with Flutter, delivering responsive and visually appealing user interfaces and demonstrating proficiency in mobile development workflows.

Flutter Dart Cross Platform Development UI Design Mobile App Testing

Computer Vision Intern

Information Technology Institute

Jul 2022 - Sep 2022 (2 months)

Developed image classification, object detection, and semantic segmentation models using TensorFlow, Keras, and OpenCV, focusing on efficiency and accuracy.

Computer Vision TensorFlow Keras OpenCV Object Detection

Team Lead, ML Engineer

Readify

Led the graduation project to extract Arabic text from PDFs/EPUBs with <15% CER, improved diacritization for pronunciation, and fine-tuned GlowTTS on a 17-hour dataset to enhance Arabic TTS alignment.

Diacritization GlowTTS CER Evaluation Data Processing

Co-founder & ML Engineer

ActveX

Co-founded ActveX and built multi-class exercise classification pipelines, fine-tuning YOLOv8m-pose for real-time posture correction and securing incubation by a national sports program.

YOLOv8 Pose Estimation Model Fine Tuning Computer Vision Python

Education

Degrees, certifications, and relevant coursework

University of Mansoura

Bachelor of Science, Computer and Control Systems Engineering

2019 - 2024

Grade: Excellent with Honour

Activities and societies: Graduation project (Readify) focused on Arabic text extraction and TTS improvements; co-founder and ML engineer at ActveX; coursework in Computer Architecture, Database Systems, Embedded Systems, Probability and Statistics, Artificial Intelligence, Computer Vision, Machine Learning.

Completed a Bachelor of Science in Computer and Control Systems Engineering with Excellent with Honour, focusing on AI, computer vision, and machine learning coursework.