Opening Preparation · every node, in order
A playable career timeline told through an Italian Game.
Anas Tarek Qumhiyeh — Opening Preparation
Start
The Italian Game, C50. Jobs as moves; annotations as voice. The front page still holds the work.
Annotation
The board is set before the first pawn moves. What follows is not a puzzle. It is the line I actually played, in a game I've played since I was a teenager — jobs as moves, annotations as voice. Chess is the content, never the lock.
Monash University — Bachelor of Engineering (Honours), Specialisation in Software Engineering
Education
University Intelligence
HONOURS FOR MONASH ENGINEERING GRADUATE
Bandar Sunway, May 2026.
Bachelor of Engineering (Honours), Specialisation in Software Engineering, First Class Honours. Monash University, Bandar Sunway, Selangor, Malaysia. Graduated May 2026. WAM 82.1, CGPA 3.82.
Annotation
Every open game starts by occupying the centre. I opened with software engineering — not because it was the only file, but because it was the one that let both bishops out.
( — The ML Defence Financial Risk Predictor — ML Risk Assessment. LightGBM / XGBoost, 0.87 AUC-ROC (15% over an unnamed baseline). SHAP for the why. BentoML to a REST API. Daily retrain on Kafka.)
Meeting e4 with e5
Identity
The classical answer: product engineering on one wing, the data path on the other.
Annotation
The classical answer. I did not decline into a closed system. Product engineering on one wing, the data path on the other.
Petronas — Project Engineer Intern
Internship
Engineering Notes
PETRONAS RETAINS YOUNG TALENT ON THE PIPELINE DESIGN TEAM
Kuala Lumpur, Nov. 2024.
Petronas — Project Engineer Intern, Nov 2024 – Feb 2025. Converted paid MATLAB licences into free Python packages, then wrote the tests that proved it. Presented usability findings to department leadership.
Annotation
Knights before bishops, they say. Petronas was the first industry square — converting paid MATLAB licences into free Python packages, then writing the tests that proved it.
( — The Elephant Gambit Distributed Lead Scorer — Large-Scale Data Mining Pipeline. PySpark over 100M-event capacity benchmark, Deep Interest Network on PyTorch DDP, checkpointed so a multi-hour run could not lose the tape.)
( — The Philidor, Declined After Petronas the MATLAB world was still there — MathCAD, department code, a quieter engineering path with licences already paid.)
2…d6 keeps the position closed. I developed the knight instead. The dashed line is honest: I could have stayed in the MATLAB world, licences already paid, MathCAD glowing on a CRT. The other life stays on the page as a ghost — visible, declined, and not a regret. I did not stay.
Setel — Software Engineer Intern
Internship
Commercial Intelligence
SETEL RECRUITS NEW HANDS ON THE PAYMENT ENGINE
Kuala Lumpur, Jul. 2025.
Setel — Software Engineer Intern, Jul 2025 – Dec 2025. Payment engine: authorization and capture. 92.5% unit-test coverage, −40% production defects.
Annotation
Payment-engine defects used to ship as far as the pump. I sat on that square and made sure the pawn could not be taken for free.
Western Digital — Full-stack Engineer
Contract
Laboratory Notes
WESTERN DIGITAL ADDS NEW HANDS ON THE LAB FLOOR
Feb. 2025.
Western Digital — Full-stack Engineer, Feb 2025 – Dec 2025. Lab-systems dashboard; role-based access for 50+ staff, −40% manual oversight. WebSocket to the lab's deep-learning model; shortest path between stations in under 100 ms.
Annotation
The Italian bishop looks at the weakest point in the castled position. At WD the weakness was watching lab systems by hand. I put a bishop there.
CircuitMindAI — PCB inspection
Project
CircuitMindAI — PCB Inspection. Amazon Nova Pro for vision, Nova Sonic for voice. Next.js and Express, CI/CD to ECS Fargate, edge cache for when the network drops.
Annotation
CircuitMind sees faults in the copper and talks back over a live voice channel. Black develops the same way — vision on the board, voice on the file.
Practice
Reliability before the break: Setel 92.5% coverage; WD role-based access; Veridian 99.9% uptime.
Annotation
Castling is not a retreat. It is the move that says king safety before the central break. I ship the same way — tests and access control before the spectacular sacrifice.
Project
MirrorFi — Grand Prize, Solana Megahack 2025. No-code vault strategies across Drift, Jupiter, and Meteora; shareable MongoDB schemas; auto-rebalancing on live APY.
Annotation
Grand prize is a symbol. The work was a product: shareable vault lines, a schema people could copy. Then the last minor piece develops.
Veridian — MLOps Tradeoff Engine
Flagship
Veridian — MLOps Tradeoff Engine: intercepts Terraform and Kubernetes and recommends lower-carbon hardware. At Monash: GraphRAG over university regulations, self-correcting Text-to-Cypher, +45% retrieval vs vector-only; an SLM distilled from that reasoning, −50% latency.
Annotation
You castle, then you break the centre. d4 is the move this scoresheet hangs on: agents that intercept infrastructure, a graph that actually understands prerequisites, measurements instead of demos. The double-exclaim is Informant’s, not mine — but I played it.
( — The Closed Centre Multi-Agent GraphRAG — Policy-corpus retrieval. LangGraph over Neo4j plus a vector store on an independent handbook and policy archive. +35% retrieval vs vector-only.)
( — Tucking the Bishop SLM Distillation Engine — Knowledge Distillation & Fine-Tuning. 70B teacher into a 3B student via QLoRA; DeepSpeed and FlashAttention so the distillation fit; −50% inference latency, 12× inference.)
The line so far
1. e4! e5 2. Nf3 Nc6 3. Bc4 Bc5 4. O-O! Nf6! 5. d4!!
Method
Named results that had to survive the demo: Veridian 99.9% uptime (−15% cloud emissions); Monash GraphRAG +45% retrieval vs vector-only; Western Digital −40% manual oversight; Financial Risk Predictor 0.87 AUC-ROC; SLM Distillation 12× inference; Lead Scorer 100M-event capacity benchmark.
Annotation
I would rather show the graph than the slogan. Accepting the pawn is accepting that the numbers have owners.
The open file
Outlook
Anas Tarek Qumhiyeh. The scoresheet stands. What the next move writes is still to be played.
Annotation
Rooks belong on the open file. The work already points there; the next move is still to be written.