420 paths, one shared factor in gold. Scroll, and the noise collapses onto it.

AI Platform & Infrastructure Lead · Abu Dhabi

SultanAlshamsi

I build AI platforms the way mission-critical systems should be run. Six years leading infrastructure at the Presidential Court. MSc in Computer Science (AI) at Khalifa University.

For six years I've kept mission-critical systems running. Now I build the platforms AI runs on: self‑hosted, observable and governed. Same discipline. New workload.

Chapter 01

Research

MSc work at Khalifa University: machine learning applied to pricing, trading and valuation. Results are reported as measured, including where a method gave something up.

Inside the model · COSC 612

The network that replaced the regression

At each of 49 exercise dates, a small network reads the price of every asset in the basket and estimates what holding the option is worth. If exercising now pays more, the model exercises.

d inputs → 64 → 64 → 32 → 1 · ReLU · dropout 0.1 · Adam · one network per exercise date

COSC 612 · 2026 · team of two

Deep learning for high-dimensional American option pricing

We replaced the regression step of Longstaff–Schwartz Monte Carlo with a PyTorch neural network, and benchmarked it against the classical polynomial method on baskets of 1 to 100 correlated assets with 50,000 simulated paths.

181×faster at 100 assets

39 s instead of 1.9 hours, with prices within $0.50 up to 15 assets and within $2 at 100.

Runtime against number of assets. Polynomial LSMC grows from 0.16 seconds at 1 asset to 6,990 seconds at 100. Deep LSMC stays between 21 and 49 seconds throughout.
View the data
AssetsPolynomial (s)Deep (s)
COSC 604 · 2025 · team of two

Reinforcement learning for trading under transaction costs

A trading environment with costs, turnover penalties and position limits. We trained PPO, DQN and a custom Double DQN, with a strict time-based split so the agents never saw the test period.

PPO earned less, but with far less risk: a higher Sharpe ratio and a third of the drawdown.

Total return against maximum drawdown on the unseen SPY test period. PPO: 11.8% return, 4.0% drawdown, Sharpe 1.61. Buy and hold: 20.1% return, 12.9% drawdown, Sharpe 0.90. Momentum: 11.1% return, 8.4% drawdown, Sharpe 0.80. 0%5%10%15% 0%5%10% Max drawdown (more risk →) Total return Buy and hold: return 20.1%, drawdown 12.9%, Sharpe 0.90 Buy and hold · Sharpe 0.90 Momentum: return 11.1%, drawdown 8.4%, Sharpe 0.80 Momentum · 0.80 PPO agent: return 11.8%, drawdown 4.0%, Sharpe 1.61 PPO agent · Sharpe 1.61 similar return to momentum, half the drawdown
Unseen SPY test period, Aug 2022 – Dec 2023 · Sharpe in labels
View the data
StrategyReturnMax drawdownSharpe
PPO agent11.8%−4.0%1.61
Buy and hold20.1%−12.9%0.90
Momentum11.1%−8.4%0.80
COSC 606 · in progress

Residential sale-price prediction

A machine-learning pipeline on 1.19 million Connecticut property sales, cleaned and audited down to 558,000 arm's-length residential sales, with any field derived from the sale price removed so the model can't cheat.

Split by time, sized by sales
Train · 2006–2021'222023–24

The model never learns from the future. Linear, regularised and tree-based models are being benchmarked next.

Chapter 02

Platform

Systems I've built in my own lab: private models, agents that run offline, and the plumbing that keeps them reliable.

Python · LiteLLM · Ansible

Self-hosted LLM platform

A private, fully on-premises LLM service. Open-weight models run on two inference hosts behind a LiteLLM gateway that load-balances, falls back when a host is down, and exposes one OpenAI-compatible API.

The lab underneath (Proxmox, kubeadm Kubernetes) is built and rebuilt end-to-end with Ansible.

Python asyncio · FastAPI

Offline agentic coding assistant

A multi-agent system (orchestrator, planner, task manager, code and shell agents) running entirely on local models, with a sandboxed tool layer, approvals and undo.

Local models lacked native function calling, so I implemented text-based ReAct tool calling: the agent writes a structured request, the system parses and runs it, and the user only sees the result.

illustrative run
Python · FinBERT · Interactive Brokers API

Multi-agent trading research stack

A modular pipeline from market and news ingestion through momentum and volatility factors, FinBERT news sentiment, volatility-targeted allocation and backtesting.

An agent layer (screener, risk, and a bull-versus-bear debate) places orders through Interactive Brokers paper trading, with a monitoring dashboard.

Chapter 03

Track record

From an ADIA scholarship to leading the platform behind mission-critical services, and now into AI.

Career timeline. Education: Purdue University 2013 to 2018 on an ADIA scholarship; Khalifa University MSc from 2025. Work: ADIA internship 2016, Principal Financial Group internship 2017, Presidential Court from 2019 to now. 20132015201720192021202320252027 Education Work Purdue · BSc CS · ADIA scholarship Khalifa University · MSc (AI) ADIA Principal Presidential Court · Systems & Virtualization Lead Now
Internships shown as points · bars to scale · swipe for earlier years
  1. 2025 — present

    Khalifa University

    MSc Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence concentration (part-time)

    • Coursework in AI, machine learning and computational finance, alongside full-time work.
  2. 2019 — present

    Presidential Court

    Systems & Virtualization Lead (Team Lead)

    • Lead the engineering team responsible for the enterprise virtualization platform behind mission-critical services.
    • Govern identity and access through Active Directory and role-based access control, applying least privilege to sensitive systems.
    • Automated provisioning, patching and health checks into repeatable, auditable jobs.
    • Own incident and change management under strict change control; mentor engineers across teams.
  3. 2013 — 2018

    Purdue University

    BSc Computer Science, Minor in Mathematics · ADIA Scholarship

  4. 2017

    Principal Financial Group

    Software Engineer Intern · USA

    • Migrated SQL reporting into a data mart and built API integrations (MuleSoft → Apigee).
  5. 2016

    Abu Dhabi Investment Authority

    Developer Intern

    • Built operational dashboards exposing performance bottlenecks and reliability targets.
AI & ML
PyTorch, scikit-learn, Hugging Face Transformers (FinBERT), Stable-Baselines3, Gymnasium; deep learning, reinforcement learning, NLP, time series, Monte Carlo simulation
LLMs & agents
Self-hosted open-weight LLM serving (vLLM, Ollama), LiteLLM gateway, OpenAI-compatible APIs, multi-agent orchestration, ReAct tool calling, FastAPI
Platform & operations
VMware vSphere, Kubernetes (SUSE Rancher, kubeadm), Docker, Proxmox, Ansible, Linux and Windows, Active Directory and RBAC; SRE, monitoring and alerting, incident and change management
Programming & languages
Python (pandas, NumPy, SciPy, asyncio), SQL, Bash, PowerShell, Git · Arabic (native), English (fluent)

Let's talk aboutrunning AI inproduction.

Happy to talk about AI platforms, sovereign infrastructure and governed AI.