Summary
Nora Akar is a Senior Software Engineer based in Switzerland with nine years of experience bridging computer architecture research and production software at organizations including EPFL, Xilinx, CSCS and Microsoft. Trained at EPFL (MSc in Computer Science), she has deep expertise in low-level systems and hardware-aware development—proficient in Python, C/C++, VHDL and FPGA toolflows—and a track record of optimizing compute- and memory-bound workloads such as SLAM on heterogeneous platforms. Her research background includes LLVM-based high-level synthesis for elastic circuits and QEMU checkpointing, giving her a rare blend of compiler, emulation and hardware design insight. At CSCS she translated research rigor into scalable software for scientific computing, and at Microsoft she now applies that systems-first perspective to large-scale engineering problems. Colleagues value her for solving hard performance and latency challenges by combining theory-informed approaches with practical engineering trade-offs.
9 years of coding experience
6 years of employment as a software developer
Master of Computer Science, Computer Science, Master of Computer Science, Computer Science at EPFL
Bachelor of Engineering (B.E.), Electrical and Electronics Engineering, Bachelor of Engineering (B.E.), Electrical and Electronics Engineering at American University of Beirut
English, French, Arabic