Nghiem Pham, backend and systems engineer

Backend and systems engineer

Computer Science at Knox College, class of 2028. I build the parts that run underneath: servers, pipelines, and GPU code.

Above: a data center floor 3D model, 48 racks and 480 nodes drawn as one instanced mesh in Three.js. Drag to orbit, and click a rack for its load, inlet temperature and power draw.

About

I started with Java coursework and moved toward the systems side: live streaming infrastructure in Go, REST APIs on Spring Boot, and CUDA kernels written from scratch. Two of my projects are deployed and serving traffic. I also work as a Teaching Assistant in the CS department, which is where I learned that explaining a bug is harder than fixing it.

Work Experience

Teaching Assistant

Jan 2026 - Present, Galesburg, IL

  • Supported office hours for 20+ students weekly, helping debug code and clarify course concepts.
  • Led weekly lab sessions of 15+ students, walking through exercises and debugging compile and runtime errors in real time.
  • Graded 30+ Java assignments covering OOP, data structures, and exception handling, with consistent and timely feedback.
JavaData StructuresDebuggingTeaching

Education

Coursework and honors

Galesburg, IL

  • Parallel Programming, Operating Systems, Distributed Systems
  • Database Systems, Computer Networks, Systems Programming
  • Dean's List
My Projects

Check out my latest work

Three things I built end to end, two of them deployed and running.

Streamable home page with the Go Live and Discover Streams actions

Streamable

Live at stream-able.com

Live streaming platform in Go. Streamers broadcast from the browser or OBS, viewers watch over HLS with live chat, emoji reactions, subscriptions, and saved recordings. Redis holds per-stream viewer state, PostgreSQL holds sessions and chat so replay stays in sync with the video.

GoPostgreSQLRedisFFmpegnginx-rtmpWebSocket
Website Source
SpinNode landing page, the career platform built for developers

SpinNode

Live at spin-node.com

Social hiring platform. Job seekers search listings, build public profiles, and talk in forums, behind a Spring Boot API with 40+ REST endpoints. Resumes are parsed with PDFBox and ranked against openings through Llama 3.3 on Groq. Direct messages fan out over WebSocket with read receipts and full history.

JavaSpring BootPostgreSQLGroq APIPDFBoxJWT + OAuth 2.0
Website Source
CPU baseline GPU, CUDA 1M vectors, D=384, RTX 3060 43x faster

CUDA Vector Search Engine

GPU similarity search

Exact vector similarity search parallelized on the GPU. Cosine-similarity kernels with shared-memory tiling and coalesced memory access, reaching a 43x speedup over the sequential CPU baseline on 1 million 384-dimensional vectors. Correctness checked against brute force, with exact top-10 agreement at every benchmark size.

CUDAC++Shared memory tilingBenchmarking
Source

Skills

Languages

  • Java
  • Go
  • C
  • C++
  • Python
  • TypeScript
  • JavaScript

Backend

  • Spring Boot
  • Gin
  • Express
  • CUDA
  • REST / OpenAPI

Databases

  • PostgreSQL
  • Redis
  • MySQL
  • MongoDB
  • SQLite

Tools

  • Docker
  • Git
  • GitHub
  • CI/CD
  • Postman
Contact

Get in Touch

Looking for a Summer 2027 internship. Send me an email and I will get back to you. If you want to see a specific part of one of the repos, say which and I will point you at it.

nghpham.dev@gmail.com