Islam Kassem

About

I build AI systems that hold up in production.

Islam Kassem, AI and Machine Learning Engineer

I'm an AI Engineer based in Riyadh with five years of shipping machine learning to production, first as a freelancer across 50+ client projects and since then inside product and enterprise teams. I work across the full delivery stack: data pipelines, experimentation, fine-tuning, inference optimization, deployment, and monitoring.

My recent work covers enterprise RAG and LLM assistants, on-premise model deployments for organizations whose data can't leave their infrastructure, speech-to-text pipelines, semantic search, and video intelligence.

Most of my modeling is in PyTorch and Hugging Face: LoRA/QLoRA fine-tuning of open-weight models such as LLaMA, Qwen, and Mistral, embedding and vision models for retrieval, and quantization and batching to make inference fast and affordable.

On the infrastructure side I use Docker, Kubernetes, AWS, and GCP Vertex AI, with MLflow, Weights & Biases, and GitHub Actions for tracking and CI/CD. I treat system design, from data versioning to serving and monitoring, as part of the job, not an afterthought.