Zhafira Fawnia

Hi, I'm Zhafira / Fira!

I am a software engineer with 5+ years of experience. Ex-Garena, Microsoft, and YC startup.

I have 680+ hours in Baldur's Gate 3, 250+ in Dragon's Dogma 2 (not counting the new DLC), and I am currently playing Stardew Valley, because I like optimizing business units and delivering shareholder value.

I love gaming and computer science. Outside of being a software engineer, I am also a graduate student at Brown University studying Computer Science, with Applied Mathematics cross-registration at Harvard University.

Academia-wise, I have worked on research at MIT's McGovern Institute and I am currently doing Reading & Research at the Serre Lab at Brown. The lab works at the intersection of neuroscience, cognitive science, computer vision, and AI, and is part of Brown's broader Carney Institute for Brain Science community.

Publications & Research

Does Curiosity Shape Transferable Representations? Intrinsic Motivation as a Representation Learning Mechanism for Cross-Task Transfer in Procgen
Fawnia, Z.*, Aggarwal, H.*, Ali, M.*, Macias, E.*, Yu, W.*, Konidaris, G.  ·  Brown University

We study whether intrinsic-motivation objectives such as ICM and RND can produce representations that transfer across Procgen tasks, rather than only improving exploration in the source environment.

Grad-CAM visualizations from the cross-task transfer paper
Grad-CAM saliency diagnostics across Procgen source games and representation-learning objectives.
Hierarchical, Interactive, and Dynamic Predictive Capacity of Current Biopsychosocial Measurements in Psychopathology across the Lifespan
Roberts, C., Yamamoto, R., Fawnia, Z., Mistry, P., et al.  ·  2025

Multi-institutional work on machine-learning models for biopsychosocial measurements and psychopathology outcomes across the lifespan.

Predictive performance across broader biopsychosocial and objective/subjective measures
Predictive performance across parent-to-child, objective, and self-report measures for ADHD, anxiety, depression, and educational performance.

Experience

Nov 2025 — Present
Software Engineer, Mid-Level · GYLD
Games · data systems · backend infrastructure

Architecting large-scale game analytics and backend systems across PostgreSQL, SQL Server, C#, Redis, and production monitoring. Recent work includes pipelines processing 900M+ time-series records annually, bulk aggregation jobs with ~100× speedups, cross-platform game analytics APIs, and resilient distributed worker infrastructure.

Jan 2022 — Aug 2025
Software Engineer II, AI/ML · Garena (Sea Ltd.)
Game AI · reinforcement learning · Unreal Engine 5

Designed and prototyped intelligent in-game agents for RPG environments, including companions, enemies, and bosses. Worked on FSM- and RL-based decision systems, adaptive combat behaviors, simulation environments, and runtime profiling for large-scale encounters.

Summer 2026
Software Engineer, Contract · Bizzed AI
Deployment · DevOps · full-stack engineering · platform infrastructure

Worked across deployment, DevOps, backend, and full-stack software engineering for Palantir Peptides, a platform for collecting and growing self-reported peptide research data. Responsible for production deployment and platform engineering across the application stack.

Aug 2025 — Nov 2025
Machine Learning Engineer, Part-Time · VistaLink Technologies
Python · vector databases · semantic search · backend systems

Built and refined hotel-data pipelines, scraping infrastructure, vector-database architecture, embedding workflows, and clustering systems for semantic search and intelligent recommendations.

Feb 2025 — May 2025
Data Engineer, Contract · Myoact Denmark
Python · Spark · Iceberg · Docker · MinIO · FastAPI

Developed ETL pipelines and a data-lake architecture across multiple data sources, with stakeholder-facing API dashboards and operational observability.

Aug 2021 — Jan 2022
Data & AI Apprentice · Microsoft
Machine learning · Azure · Power BI

Led a 14-person intern team delivering weekly Data & AI projects, including sentiment analysis, competitor intelligence, ML-Ops suitability assessment, and property-price prediction pipelines.

Feb 2021 — Apr 2021
Operations — Transaction Analyst Intern · Aspire (YC)
Fintech · fraud analysis · ETL

Worked on fraudulent-transaction monitoring and data transformation, improving transaction-checking accuracy to above 85% while supporting operational response workflows.

Awards

1st Place · Alibaba × GoTo GenAI Hackathon
Nationwide · 2025

Lead engineer for GoGuard, an AI companion concept for passenger safety during rides.

2nd Place · BPJS Health Hackathon, AI Track
Nationwide · 2024

Built a multimodal diagnostic chatbot designed to reduce LLM hallucinations.

Finalist · Toyota Hackathon
Nationwide · 2019

Proposed accessible automotive technology for people with disabilities through Project Nakama.

Accepted Proposal · Young Innovators Summit, Japan
2018

Proposed an “AI as human accompanist” concept following the emergence of Transformer models.

Sea Undergraduate Scholarship
2018

First-batch scholarship recipient; maintained a GPA above 3.50 throughout undergraduate study.