Adilbek Bazarkulov
Software engineer
3× hackathon winner (HackUP 2026, BeaverHacks 2025, QuackHacks 2025)Founding engineer at Zyp, research software engineer in the Ramsey Lab at Oregon State on the NIH Translator, previously machine learning intern at Scripps Research.
About
I could see the Pacific Ocean from my office at one of the world's leading biomedical research institutes. Part of me was still a boy running around with horses in the mountains of Kyrgyzstan.
I was in La Jolla, California, working as a machine learning intern at Scripps Research. A long way from those mountains, and from the capital I'd moved to later. But looking out at the ocean, I recognized the same feeling of freedom I'd had as a kid. So much had changed, and that part of me was still there.
Back home, I spent my afternoons after school looking after my grandpa while my friends were out. I had an old computer and slow internet. I started tinkering, found HTML and CSS, and made my first website: three horsemen, using PNGs I'd downloaded from the internet. Click one and it made a noise.
My grandpa got interested. “Three horsemen is not an army,” he told me. So I added fifty. That was the part that amazed me: he could have an idea, I could change a few lines, and we could see the result on the screen together. Coding gave me another kind of freedom: I could imagine something, try it, and change it again. My grandpa could be part of it, too.
That curiosity stayed with me through the move to the capital and, eventually, to California. Today I'm a founding engineer at Zyp and a research software engineer at Oregon State, working on the NIH Biomedical Data Translator. The problems are bigger now, but I still love how quickly an idea can become something you can try.
I enjoy the whole process, from designing something to getting it into people's hands. I built Housey, an iOS and Android app in React Native, after arguments between my roommates and me. I turned that problem into a roommate planner that I now use alongside around 200 other people.
I drove to a hackathon in Portland alone and came home with four keyboards and four JBL speakers. I'd won a prize meant for a team of four. There was just me. I built Gestro that weekend, a hand-tracking AI paint studio. Most of the time, though, what I love about hackathons is building with a team: going all in for a day or two, turning an idea into an MVP that solves a problem, and seeing it work before we head home. The extra keyboards were a bonus.
I'm finishing my M.S. in Computer Science at Oregon State in June 2027. One day I want to be back in the mountains of Kyrgyzstan, with horses, still writing code.
What I want next is backend and infra work on a product people depend on.
Experience
Jul 2026 - present
Founding engineer
CurrentPostgres row-level security and least-privilege roles, so one company can never read another company's data
Fastify and TypeScript API for KYC/KYB checks, Plaid bank linking, and HMAC-verified webhooks
Moved the backend off Supabase edge functions to Fastify and Prisma, migrations run before every Railway deploy
TypeScript, Fastify, Prisma, Zod, PostgreSQL, Better Auth, Plaid, Railway
Mar 2025 - present
Research software engineer
Current
Ramsey Laboratory, Oregon State UniversityPer-pull-request preview environments for the Translator reasoning service with GitHub Actions, Docker, and nginx
95% less memory per worker on an in-memory graph service: moved to uWSGI and froze Python's garbage collector to keep copy-on-write pages shared
Worker deadlocks went from several a month to zero
Python, Flask, uWSGI, nginx, Docker, Kubernetes, AWS EKS, OpenTelemetry
Jun 2026 - Aug 2026
Machine learning intern
Scripps Research, Moore Vogel Lab1 of 35 interns picked from 1,000+ applicants
Fine-tuned Mixtral 8x22B (141B, mixture-of-experts) with QLoRA across multiple GPUs and served it with vLLM in a live long COVID clinical trial
RAG over trial protocols with E5-large-v2 and FAISS plus guardrail gates. 91% clinician agreement, 99% fewer answers not backed by the protocol
Python, PyTorch, Hugging Face, QLoRA, vLLM, FAISS
Sep 2024 - Mar 2025
Graduate teaching assistant
Taught CS 290 web development for two terms
Weekly labs, office hours, code review on term projects
HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Node.js
Jul 2024 - Sep 2024
Software engineering intern
Analyzed slow queries on the SQL Server behind clinician single sign-on, proposed indexes, archived stale sessions. Live database 40% smaller
PowerShell and SQL monitor on login logs that alerts IT and security over email and Teams
SQL Server, T-SQL, PowerShell, Windows Server
Sep 2022 - Dec 2023
Undergraduate teaching assistant
Taught intro Python to 150+ students
Wrote homework, reference solutions, and slides for the course
Python
Projects
Things I build on my own time. Some won hackathons, one has paying users.
Research
Open source services I maintain for the Biomedical Data Translator, an NIH program run by NCATS and funded at about $8 million.
In-memory knowledge graph service. About 7 million concepts and 30 million relationships in RAM.
Python, Flask, uWSGI, nginx, Docker, AWS EC2, Kubernetes
Pipelines that turn about 30 biomedical datasets into one graph format, plus the server that hosts the releases.
Python, uv, Koza, ORION, Biolink Model, AWS S3, AWS EC2, Flask, Gunicorn, nginx, Docker
Build system that merges biomedical source databases into one knowledge graph.
Python, Bash, Snakemake, Neo4j, AWS S3, Docker, Biolink Model, OWL
Reasoning agent for the NIH Translator. Sends one question to around 40 knowledge sources and ranks the answers with evidence.
Python, Flask, uWSGI, MySQL, SQLite, Neo4j, Docker, AWS EC2, Kubernetes
Honors
2024–2027
2026
2026
2025
2025
Fall 2021 – Winter 2023
honor rollEECS undergraduate honor roll
top grades in EECS
2024 – Present
honor rollEECS graduate honor roll
top grades in EECS
2023
merit scholarshipEdith McDougall scholarship
merit-based undergraduate scholarship, Oregon State University
2021–2023
merit scholarshipinternational student continuation scholarship
merit-based scholarship recognizing academic excellence among international students
academic & community involvement
2020–2023
2021–2023
2021–2023
2021–2023
Teaching
courses taught at Oregon State University as a teaching assistant.
CS 290web development, Oregon State University
fall 2024 – winter 2025
CS 162intro to CS II, Oregon State University
summer 2022
CS 161intro to CS I, Oregon State University
winter 2021 – spring 2022
ENGR 102engineering fundamentals, Oregon State University
fall 2021
Activity
Jun 2026
attended the NIH Biomedical Data Translator June 2026 Hackathon on the NIH Rockledge campus (Bethesda, Maryland) as a Ramsey Lab member, working with other Translator project teams. hosted by NCATS
.Apr 2026
won 1st place innovator track and 3rd place best project overall for Gestro at HackUP 2026, University of Portland
.Nov 2025
placed 3rd place Polymarket track for PolyDebate at QuackHacks 2.0, University of Oregon
.Sep 2025
attended the NIH Biomedical Data Translator Fall 2025 Hackathon on the NIH Rockledge campus (Bethesda, Maryland) as a Ramsey Lab visitor, working alongside other Translator project teams on the Expander Agent stack. hosted by NCATS
.Apr 2025
won 1st place data-driven solutions track for Greeney at BeaverHacks Spring 2025, Oregon State University
.Spring 2023
presented my senior capstone project, partnered with HP
, at the EECS Spring 2023 Expo in the Kelley Engineering Center, Oregon State University .
Life
A few moments from my life.