Sayf Chafik

My background spans mechanical design, electronics, embedded programming, and machine learning, with a focus on making algorithms work reliably on constrained hardware. I'm comfortable moving between simulation and the physical: debugging hardware in the lab in the morning, tuning an inference pipeline in the afternoon.

During my R&D internship at Hilti, I worked on deploying edge AI models for industrial sensing applications using OpenVINO on an i.MX8 processor. That experience pushed me to think about models not just as accuracy numbers, but as systems with power budgets, latency constraints, and real-world failure modes. Getting something to run correctly on a chip is a different problem than getting it to run correctly in a notebook.

Beyond engineering, I care about what gets built and why. I follow the deep-tech startup space closely, particularly robotics, computer vision, and autonomous systems. I am looking for roles where I can contribute both at the technical and product level, whether at an early-stage company, an accelerator-backed venture, or an ambitious R&D team.