My Story

I was born in Qarabagh, Ghazni Province, Afghanistan, and grew up witnessing the country shift from Taliban rule to a period of democratic transition. From a young age, I was drawn to computers and technology, which led me to study Information Technology. It was during one of my undergraduate courses that I discovered Data Science, a field that immediately captured my curiosity. When the Taliban regained control of Kabul, I, along with many other US Embassy scholars, was evacuated to Bishkek. While awaiting immigration to the United States, I enrolled in a Master of Business Administration program for a year. Eventually, I was awarded a full scholarship to pursue a Master of Science in Data Science at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, and that opportunity truly changed the course of my life.

Since then, I’ve immersed myself in the field through academic work and hands-on industry experience. Most recently, during my internship at Expedia Group, I worked with large-scale customer data and focused on supervised learning techniques to build models that predict customer lifetime value and churn. These experiences taught me not only how to design and evaluate models, but also how to collaborate with cross-functional teams and apply machine learning to real-world business problems. I’ve also had the chance to work on several independent projects, including one that automated immigration form filling using LLMs, OCR, and Retrieval-Augmented Generation pipelines.

As I look to the future, I remain open to all sectors within data science but recognize the importance of specialization. I’m particularly interested in advancing my expertise in large language models, fine-tuning transformer-based architectures, and contributing to research in that area. At the same time, I recently earned the AWS Machine Learning Specialty certification, which strengthened my ability to not only build models but also deploy them in production environments. I’m currently seeking roles where I can continue growing, such as Data Scientist, Machine Learning Scientist, Machine Learning Engineer, AI Engineer, or Data Engineer I, bringing both technical skill and a deep sense of purpose to every opportunity.

I’m currently located in West Sacramento, California, and I’m open to relocation at my own expense if the right opportunity comes along. Please don’t hesitate to reach out to me by email.

My Github: https://github.com/BashirGulistani