Abhiram Nair
Computer Science · The University of Texas at Austin

Abhiram Nair

Undergraduate CS student, Class of 2030 — building at the seam between software and hardware.

  • Austin & Round Rock, Texas
  • Software Engineering Intern at Polaris Inc.
  • Embedded systems & applied AI

I write software that has to run on something real. Over three summers at Polaris I helped build internal tooling that lets hundreds of engineers test infotainment software against simulated vehicles, and outside of work I keep ending up with a Raspberry Pi on my desk and a breadboard half-wired next to it. I came to UT Austin to put rigorous foundations underneath the instincts I picked up shipping things.

See what I’ve built Read my resume
Academic goals

What I want out of a CS degree

I arrived with a fair amount of practical experience and some conspicuous gaps. The next four years are about closing them deliberately rather than by accident.

01

Understand the machine underneath

Work carefully through UT’s systems sequence — architecture, operating systems, concurrency, compilers. I have written C++ that talked to a vehicle bus without fully understanding what the operating system was doing on my behalf. I would like that to stop being true.

02

Learn the theory behind the AI I already use

I have shipped products on top of language and vision models, but calling an API is not the same as understanding one. I want the linear algebra, probability, and model intuition to judge when machine learning is genuinely the right tool — and when it is an expensive way to avoid writing a function.

03

Get into research and open source

My goal is to join an undergraduate research group by my second year, ideally in embedded or human-centered computing, and to start contributing to open-source projects. Both put my work in front of people who will tell me plainly when it is wrong, which is how I have learned fastest so far.

04

Keep shipping to real users

Coursework and industry work sharpen different things. I intend to keep returning to internships each summer and to keep maintaining side projects during the year, so that what I learn in lecture gets tested against software other people depend on.

Selected successes

A short record

The work I would point to first. The full list lives on my resume.

2024 – 2026 · Summers

Polaris Inc.

Software Engineering Intern

Contributed to DevTools, an internal platform that lets hundreds of Polaris developers test software against mock vehicles instead of physical ones, cutting testing cost and turnaround. Built into its D-Bus layer, which simulates live vehicle data for infotainment systems, working in C++, QML, JavaScript, and CSHTML. Also helped launch a multi-year rules-engine project to streamline how vehicle data is collected, stored, and transformed.

Dec 2024 – Mar 2025

Code2College AI Program

People’s Favorite AI Project Award

Over four months and roughly 100 hours, built a full-stack web application that generates personalized outfits from a user’s wardrobe, calendar, and local weather, combining OpenAI’s APIs with Google Gemini and Imagen for image understanding and generation. Presented to executives from Indeed and Favor and an audience of fifty, and won the cohort’s top audience award.

Sep 2025

Cirrus Logic Embedded Systems Hackathon

Team lead, five engineers

Designed and built a hardware memory game on a Raspberry Pi 4 in Python, driving a 4×4 LED button grid and a speaker as the playing surface. Led the team: broke the build into tractable pieces, delegated them, and presented our approach and failure modes to judges at the close.

Mar 2025

CodeWizardsHQ × Round Rock ISD Hackathon

3rd place of 30+ teams

Led four people through a nine-hour build: a web application using Google Teachable Machine to watch a user’s exercise form and give real-time corrective feedback. Set the technical direction, split the work, and delivered a working prototype and a pitch inside the deadline.

2023 – 2026

UIL Computer Science

1st at Stony Point High School, raw written score

Competed individually — forty advanced Java questions in forty-five minutes — and in the two-hour team event solving twelve complex programming problems. Sustained practice in algorithmic reasoning and fast, accurate debugging under real time pressure.

Coursework

Think Faire: Robotics

My assigned CS 109 Think Faire topic, with three proposed presentations on real-world applications of robotics — surgical teleoperation, warehouse fleet coordination, and agricultural computer vision.

Read my Think Faire proposals →
Get in touch

I’m glad to hear from people

Whether it is about a project, a research group looking for an undergraduate, or an internship — email is the surest way to reach me.

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