Eldar Hasanov

Hi! I’m Eldar — a software systems and security engineer currently pursuing my Master’s in Advanced Computing (Security & Reliability) at Imperial College London.
Previously, I earned my B.A. in Computer Science from UC Berkeley in May 2025, where I focused on systems, theory, and security — while also teaching, researching, and building educational infrastructure tools. 🌉

In recent years, I’ve focused on building secure and scalable systems that serve real users and contribute to research. At UC Berkeley’s CS Ed R&D Group (under Prof. Dan Garcia), I led a team of five engineers to develop a cloud-native grade analytics platform for instructors, deployed in Berkeley’s CS10 course. I built microservices, real-time dashboards, security defenses, and an ETL pipeline for HTTP packet logging and analysis.

Alongside that, I am a tech lead in the ACE Lab, where I co-authored two tools for interactive graph assessments, published and presented our work at ACM SIGCSE and ACM CompEd, and deployed them to three universities via the PrairieLearn platform open-source contribution.

Outside academia, I’ve worked across several startups and research labs in Silicon Valley. At Anthems Inc., I led the design of Ethereum-based dynamic NFT smart contracts for a music sharables platform of 60,000+ listeners. At 1PR, I built full-stack music analytics apps using React, Django, and Flask to provide data-insight support for 10,000+ independent artists.
At the Lawrence Space Sciences Laboratory, I worked on machine learning models for NASA Stardust Mission data, improving autoencoder performance on EDS scans. I’ve also engineered a novel smart contract vulnerability detection tool under Prof. Dawn Song, and helped develop new class of BERT-based LLM models used for editorial tools for New York Times as a summer researcher at USC.

I’m originally from Baku, Azerbaijan 🇦🇿, where I lived until I was 16. I then moved to Oxford, UK 🇬🇧 for high school, followed by my undergrad in Bay Area, California 🇺🇸, and now grad school in London, UK. That journey across cultures has shaped not only how I think as an engineer, but also how I see education, global issues, and people. 🌍

Outside of tech, I’m into football (the real one ⚽️), playing guitar 🎸, and overly competitive board game nights 🎲.