Aref

Aref Mehr

Software Engineer  ·  Robotics & ML Enthusiast  ·  Love Cars

Get to know me

About Me

Hi, I’m Aref. I’m an Engineer at the core — though, for a brief moment, I almost wanted to become a pilot. By day, I write the codes! Currently, I’m working close to the hardware on embedded systems, but my path here has been anything but linear. I’ve built startups from the ground up, worked in established companies handling millions of requests per second, and dived deep into computer vision. I think it’s such a cliché, but I define myself as a person who can’t shy away from a challenge — an engineering challenge, to be precise. Especially if the challenge includes a "juicy refactor".

By night, the engineering just doesn’t stop. You’ll find me tinkering with LLMs and automated bots, CAD modelling and 3D printing. And if it’s a sunny Saturday? I’m likely covered in grease, fixing my car or driving it to the nearest Cars and Coffee.

Work & projects

My Stories

A selective look at the roles and builds that shaped me.

Where I've worked

2023 - Present

Sr. Software Engineer

Automata Tech · London, UK

Building the software layer that makes laboratory robots talk to the cloud. High-level instrument drivers, backend integration, and the infrastructure glue in between.

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2022 - 2023

Software Engineer

Sprout AI · London, UK

Serving machine learning models in production — FastAPI backends, Redis caching, and AWS infrastructure with kserve keeping PyTorch models alive under real traffic.

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2017 - 2020

Engineer → Technical Lead

Cafe Bazaar · Tehran, Iran

Three years on the search team — starting as an engineer on Elasticsearch and Django, eventually leading the team through a full migration from monolith to microservices on Kubernetes.

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2011 - 2016

Research Assistant → Team Lead

NAO Biped Lab · Qazvin, Iran

Five years in a university robotics lab — writing vision and localization systems for humanoid robots, competing at RoboCup, and eventually leading the team itself.

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Projects & side work

2019 · ETH Zürich

Fully Automated Rescue Robot

Robotic Summer School — 1st Prize

A fully autonomous robot built in a week for a disaster scenario — and it won. Real-time mapping, sensor fusion, and a team that didn't sleep much.

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2020 · M.Sc. Thesis

Gesture Recognition via Spiking CNNs

arXiv:1911.03630

My master's research: using Spiking Neural Networks with Dynamic Vision Sensors to recognise gestures — a more biologically plausible approach to action recognition.

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2019 · Hackathon

A Self-Driving Car in a Weekend

Cafe Bazaar Internal Hackathon

A self-driving RC car built in a weekend using end-to-end learning on top of ResNet. It drove several miles autonomously. We have video.

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2018 · Cafe Bazaar

Breaking the Monolith

Microservices Refactor

Led the split of a Django search monolith into Kubernetes microservices with a multi-layered Redis caching system — handling millions of daily requests.

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