Python

Diagram of pages, GQA heads, and a prefix-sharing trie routing memory blocks.

Building a Paged KV Cache with GQA Sharing and Prefix-Reuse Eviction

TL;DR — A paged KV cache with grouped-query attention (GQA) sharing and a prefix-reuse eviction policy is one of the most credible LLM-systems projects you can ship to a CV in a weekend. It mirrors the design choices in vLLM, SGLang, and the RadixAttention paper, demonstrates that you understand memory hierarchies, attention math, and eviction, and produces a runnable artifact you can benchmark on real prompts. Why This Project Stands Out on a CV Hiring managers for inference, ML platform, and applied-LLM roles scan portfolios for evidence that a candidate can translate a paper into a working system. A paged KV cache hits that target harder than almost any other weekend project because the design space is genuinely contested in production: vLLM ships PagedAttention, SGLang ships RadixAttention, TensorRT-LLM ships in-flight batching with custom paged kernels, and HuggingFace TGI ships its own block manager. Building one from scratch proves you have read those systems and understood why they look the way they do. ...

Diagram of a draft model proposing tokens and a target LLM verifying them in a speculative decoding loop.

Build a Speculative Decoding Sampler: A CV-Worthy Side Project

A complete, runnable Python project that pairs a draft n-gram model with a target LLM to verify multiple tokens per forward pass, plus a roadmap for turning it into production-flavored work.

Building a Mini Search Engine with an Inverted Index and TF-IDF: A Hands-On CV Project

A hands-on build guide for a portfolio-grade search engine: tokenize documents, build an inverted index, rank with TF-IDF, and ship something that actually works. Includes runnable code, tests, and a roadmap of upgrades that turn the toy into production-flavored work.

Diagram of a Postgres-backed job queue with workers, retries, and a dead-letter table.

Building a Durable Job Queue in Postgres: A Portfolio Project That Signals Real Systems Skill

Build a production-flavored job queue on Postgres from scratch: schema, worker loop, retries with exponential backoff, and a dead-letter queue. A portfolio project that demonstrates real distributed systems thinking.

Architecture diagram of a Postgres-backed durable job queue

Build a Durable Postgres Job Queue: A Portfolio Project That Signals Real Systems Skill

Build a production-flavored job queue on Postgres with SKIP LOCKED, exponential backoff, and a dead-letter queue. A substantive portfolio project that demonstrates real backend systems skill.