Moldir Azhimukhanbet

About Me

I am a BS in Computer Science student at Nazarbayev University (2022–June 2026) in Astana, Kazakhstan, where I focus on computer architecture, hardware design, and machine learning systems. I’m especially interested in how we can co-design hardware, software, and AI models to make intelligent systems that are both efficient and robust on real-world platforms like FPGAs and low-resource edge devices.

My recent research work includes a UGRIP internship at the Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI), where I investigated failure modes in LLM-based assembly transpilation across x86, ARMv8, and RISC-V. There, I helped build a taxonomy of recurring translation errors and designed a synthetic program generation pipeline that produced hundreds of thousands of C programs, improving transpiler robustness on challenging cross-ISA benchmarks.

In parallel, I work as an RTL Design and Verification Engineer at Texer.AI, a hardware verification and EDA startup. I have implemented a 16-bit custom “Bitty” processor with a 21-instruction ISA, designed an asm-to-asm translator from RISC-V32E to this custom ISA, and validated the design on DE1-SoC FPGA with UART and Load-Store Unit peripherals. I also serve as a Teaching Assistant and Lab Developer for Kazakhstan’s first microarchitecture design and verification course, where I create FPGA-based labs and mentor students through RTL debugging and verification workflows.

My senior thesis focuses on an educational chatbot for second language learning: an edge-deployed STT–LLM–TTS system running on an 8GB Orange Pi NPU. I am exploring inference optimization techniques and fine-tuning a 1B-parameter model to support adaptive, low-latency language tutoring in resource-constrained environments. Outside of research and coursework, I help organize developer communities and enjoy reading, poetry, singing.

I am actively exploring opportunities for research internships and Master’s/PhD programs in computer engineering, computer architecture, systems, and AI.

Research Interests

• Microarchitecture design and hardware verification
• GPU/accelerator and FPGA-based prototyping
• Systems for ML & ML for systems (resource- and reliability-aware)
• LLMs for program translation and compiler/optimization tasks
• Open-source hardware and tooling for teaching & learning