Available for Internships · 4 to 16 months

Aarish Naiyer

// Ethereum Protocol Fellow & CS Student

Third year Computer Science student at the University of Alberta and an Ethereum Foundation Protocol Fellow, working on trust-minimized checkpoint sync for Ethereum's consensus layer in Rust. I work across the stack, from consensus-layer protocol code and low-level C systems to live web tooling, and I care about software that is correct, verifiable, and observable.

View Projects GitHub → LinkedIn → Email →

01. Experience

Experience

Ethereum Foundation, Protocol Fellow

May 2026 · Present

Building a trust-minimized alternative to checkpoint sync for Ethereum's consensus layer, replacing a centralized trust assumption with peer-to-peer verification via the Altair light client protocol and Merkle proofs.
Implemented a Rust test handler for Lighthouse's light client data collection (ef_tests) across Altair, Bellatrix, and Capella, under mentorship from a Nimbus core developer; opened a PR to Lighthouse.
Found and fixed three genesis related bugs in Lighthouse's light client logic, including incorrect finality update suppression and flawed update selection criteria; opened each as a separate PR.
Added checkpoint root verification to Lighthouse's checkpoint sync against the trusted --wss-checkpoint root, plus new SSZ types and a chunking scheme for decentralized state distribution; opened as a fifth PR.

02. Selected Works

Technical Projects

Ethereum Consensus Explorer

Live

Interactive block explorer for Ethereum's consensus layer. Search any slot and inspect its block, proposer, state and parent roots, attestations, and finality status, fetched live from the Beacon Chain.
Built from scratch in vanilla JavaScript with async data fetching, JSON parsing, and graceful handling of skipped or missing slots.
Deployed on GitHub Pages; surfaces the consensus-layer data my fellowship work is built on.

live_demo → source_code →

Canada Student Budget Calculator

Python / Cloud

Real-time financial planning tool for international students covering 30+ universities across 11 Canadian cities.
Fetches live config data from Amazon S3 via REST API with HTTP error handling, timeout config, and response caching.
Seasonal cost modelling (academic vs. summer), multi-city comparisons, and CSV export.

live_demo →

CPU Scheduling Simulator

Systems / C

Implemented five CPU scheduling algorithms (FCFS, SJF, STCF, Round Robin, MLFQ) with preemptive and non-preemptive execution models.
Designed an O(n log n) priority-queue scheduling engine using efficient data structures in C.
Automated Gantt chart generation and benchmarked performance metrics (wait time, turnaround, throughput) across CPU-bound, I/O-bound, and mixed workloads.

source_code →

Loan Default Prediction System

ML / Python

Decision Tree classifier achieving 73% accuracy on 24,000+ records with precision-recall optimization for imbalanced datasets.
Preprocessing pipeline handling missing values, feature scaling, and cross-validation; evaluated with confusion matrix and classification report.
Built a CLI interface for browsing borrower profiles and prediction results with visualization aids.

source_code →

03. Profile

About Me

I'm a third year Computing Science student at the University of Alberta. I grew up in Riyadh and moved to Edmonton for university. Right now most of my time goes to my Ethereum Foundation fellowship, where I write Rust for the Lighthouse client, and to coursework. I like finding out how things work underneath, which is how I ended up reading consensus specs and writing a CPU scheduler in C.

Away from the computer I'm usually climbing at Boulders or Niche, playing badminton with friends, or at the gym. I hike in the Rockies when I can, cook South Asian food at home, and take on custom 3D printing jobs around Edmonton.

[Community]

I help organize natHACKS with NeurAlbertaTech, handling hackathon logistics and participant coordination. I'm also a General Faculties Councillor, representing Science students.

[Competitions]

Placed third at a case competition hosted by the Business Students' Association and sponsored by Cenovus Energy. Before that, my team was a finalist (1 of 6 out of 30+) in the McKinsey Case Competition run by UAlberta ICA.

[Climbing and Hiking]

I boulder at Boulders and Niche, and do some karma cleaning at one of them. In the Rockies I've done Sulphur Mountain and Sulphur Skyline, and turned back near the ridge on Wilcox Peak in November snow. I want to get up a 3,000 metre summit next.

[Badminton and Gym]

I play badminton regularly with friends and train at the gym. It's how I reset.

[Kitchen]

I cook South Asian food at home. Chicken korma is a recent one I made.

[3D Printing]

I design and print custom parts for people around Edmonton, from ceramics molds to cookie cutters and stamps.

04. Tech Stack

Skills & Tools

Core Stack

Languages

Python
Rust
C / C++
JavaScript
TypeScript
SQL
Bash / Shell
R

Testing & QA

Selenium WebDriver
Pytest
Page Object Model
REST API testing
Postman

Cloud & Data

Amazon S3
REST APIs
PostgreSQL / MySQL
MongoDB
Pandas / NumPy

Tools & Systems

Git / GitHub
Linux / UNIX
VS Code / PyCharm
Streamlit
Matplotlib

Currently Exploring

Node.js Playwright GitHub Actions / CI-CD Ethereum Cryptography (ECDSA, Keccak-256, BIP-32) Mathematics for Data Science & ML Machine Learning fundamentals

Get in Touch

Seeking internship and co-op opportunities of 4 to 16 months in software engineering, protocol / systems, or QA. Open to relocating anywhere in Canada.

Send Message LinkedIn →