PhD in Computer Science · Security, Privacy, IoT, and Systems

Security and privacy research, built for real systems.

I’m Dilawer Ahmed, a software engineer at Microsoft AI and a security and privacy researcher. I build production systems and study how real platforms expose—and can better protect—people and data.

07
Publications
07
Projects
87%
Compute cost reduction
Up to 50%
Pipeline recall improvement

Focus

What I work on

Applied AI infrastructure, security measurement, and privacy research across voice assistants, IoT, and the web.

Research

Security, privacy, and the web

My research focuses on security, privacy, voice assistants, IoT, and web platforms, with an emphasis on making measurement and attack insights meaningful for real systems.

Background

Engineering with a research lens

I completed a PhD in Computer Science at NC State and earned a BS in Computer Science from LUMS, which shapes how I balance rigor, usability, and production constraints.

Career

Experience

Research, product, and engineering work across industry and academia.

Aug 2025 – Present · Mountain View, CA

Software Engineer II

Microsoft AI

At Microsoft AI, I build enhanced page features and web document features that improve how models ground on the open web. I also work on URL normalization and related platform capabilities that reduce duplication, improve resource efficiency, and strengthen product quality.

May 2024 – Aug 2024 · Redmond, WA

Software Engineer Intern

Microsoft

At Microsoft, I worked on location intelligence systems for advertising, redesigning an offline pipeline in Azure Data Lake to improve recall by up to 50% and increase downstream impact. I also shipped a C++ online serving path and partnered with the Bing Maps team on reverse geocoding, reducing compute cost by 87% while increasing coverage by 25%.

May 2022 – Aug 2022 · Sunnyvale, CA

Software Engineer Intern

Google

At Google Cloud, I explored GPU virtualization strategies for machine learning acceleration and built a C++ performance projection tool to estimate remote GPU latency and bandwidth with lower simulator overhead. I also helped drive a protocol buffer dependency migration that reduced maintenance friction and improved internal developer workflows.

May 2020 – Dec 2020 · Lahore, Pakistan

CTO

KalPay Technologies

At KalPay, I led engineering for a BNPL platform, defining the product architecture and guiding execution across the merchant, consumer, and admin applications. The role combined early-stage product thinking with hands-on delivery across the company’s core fintech stack.

Jun 2020 – Dec 2020 · Lahore, Pakistan

Software Engineer

Technologies of People Initiative Lab

At Technologies of People Initiative Lab, I built research prototypes and data systems for applied computing projects, translating exploratory ideas into usable systems. My work spanned full-stack implementation, experimentation, and technical support for the lab’s broader research agenda.

Projects

Selected Projects

A mix of research programs and production systems work across voice assistants, IoT, web privacy, ads, infrastructure, and applied ML.

View all projects

Security & Privacy Researcher

Voice Assistant Security & Privacy

Measured cross-platform leakage and built a deployable traffic-analysis defense.

Measuring, attacking, and defending modern voice assistant ecosystems, from traffic fingerprinting to scalable policy analysis and deployable defenses.

Software Engineer, Microsoft

Location Intelligence Systems

Cut compute cost by 87% while increasing coverage by 25%.

Production engineering for large-scale location processing, delivery, and ranking systems, with a focus on reliability, quality, and computational efficiency.

Privacy & Computer Vision Researcher

Privacy-preserving Vision Systems

Preserved downstream utility while reducing re-identification risk.

Designing transformations that preserve utility in camera and video data while making re-identification and leakage substantially harder.

Software Engineering Intern, Google

Cloud GPU Systems

Built C++ simulation tooling for reasoning about remote GPU performance.

Tooling and systems work for reasoning about remote GPU performance, virtualization, and infrastructure behavior in ML-oriented cloud environments.

Web Privacy Researcher

Web Advertising & Privacy Controls

Exposed the tracking cost hidden in ad-blocking exceptions and defaults.

Studying how advertising ecosystems, exception lists, and privacy tools interact in practice, with a focus on the real privacy cost of defaults.

IoT Privacy & Device Fingerprinting

Security & Privacy Researcher

IoT Privacy & Device Fingerprinting

Tested encrypted-traffic fingerprinting under realistic open-world conditions.

Understanding how encrypted traffic reveals device identity and usage patterns, and designing measurements that better capture open-world privacy risk in IoT ecosystems.

Research

Latest Publications

Recent conference papers, posters, and research outputs.

Browse all publications

Connect

Contact

Based in Mountain View and open to conversations about security, privacy, applied research, and engineering leadership.

Email

dilawer11@gmail.com

Location

Mountain View, CA

United States