Muhammad Bilal
About Muhammad Bilal
Muhammad Bilal serves as the Senior Backend Engineering Manager for the AI Ops Team at Unbabel, where he leads a team of six and focuses on mentoring and individual development. He has a strong academic background in Distributed Computing and has previously held various roles in both academia and industry, contributing to AI strategy and architectural improvements.
Work at Unbabel
Muhammad Bilal currently serves as the Senior Backend Engineering Manager in the AI Operations team at Unbabel, a position he has held since 2023. In this role, he leads a team of six, focusing on mentoring and developing individual learning and development plans. He is responsible for managing relationships with several external vendors and contributes to the AI strategy of Unbabel, particularly in productizing large language models (LLMs) for various applications. Previously, he worked as the Manager of Chaos (Team Lead) for the Machine Translation (MT) team for three months in 2023 and as a Senior Seriously Bored Engineer in the same team from 2021 to 2023.
Education and Expertise
Muhammad Bilal has an extensive educational background in Distributed Computing. He earned a Master's Degree from KTH Royal Institute of Technology, studying European Masters in Distributed Computing from 2014 to 2015. He completed his Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) in Distributed Computing at Université catholique de Louvain from 2015 to 2021 and at Instituto Superior Técnico from 2018 to 2021. He also holds a Bachelor of Science in Computer Engineering from COMSATS Institute of Information Technology, which he completed from 2008 to 2012.
Background
Before joining Unbabel, Muhammad Bilal held various positions in academia and industry. He was a Just Visiting PhD Student at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in 2017 and 2018 for four months each time. He also worked as a Mismanaged Research Engineer at KTH Royal Institute of Technology from 2020 to 2021. His early experience includes an internship at Telefonica, where he worked on his Master thesis for five months in 2015.
Achievements
During his tenure at Unbabel, Muhammad Bilal implemented architectural improvements to the real-time inference system, achieving a 40% cost reduction. He is also responsible for establishing best practices for code reviews, off-sites, hiring, screening, and onboarding within the organization. His contributions to the AI strategy at Unbabel focus on enhancing the application of large language models across various use cases.