Benjamin Hadad

Software Engineer Databricks Bellevue, WA

Benjamin Hadad

I build agentic systems, data infrastructure, and evaluation tools where production engineering meets machine learning and competitive problem solving.

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Portrait of Benjamin Hadad
#1 WorldwideOpenAI Model Craft Challenge: Parameter Golf
Round 3 + Top 200Meta Hacker Cup 2025, worldwide
Top 0.8%IMC Prosperity competitors

AboutEngineer · Researcher · Competitor

Engineer, researcher, competitive problem solver.

I'm a software engineer at Databricks, where I work on MCP integrations, agentic access-control operations, and evaluation systems for Unity Catalog.

Competitions have been the constant: #1 worldwide in OpenAI's Model Craft Challenge, Round 3 and top 200 at Meta Hacker Cup, and top 0.8% at IMC Prosperity, going back to USACO Platinum and AIME in high school.

Profiles: github.com/codemath3000 · linkedin.com/in/benjamin-hadad

ExperienceProduction engineering for AI & data systems

Feb 2026 - Present Bellevue, WA Full-time

Software Engineer / Databricks

  • Built an MCP integration that lets AI agents perform CRUD operations on attribute-based access-control (ABAC) policies in Unity Catalog.
  • Designed a system to purge orphaned access-control classifications, improving policy-evaluation performance.
  • Created LLM-as-judge benchmarks to objectively measure agentic capability, sharpening prompt engineering and agent-harness evaluation.
May - Aug 2024 Bellevue, WA Internship

SDE Intern / Amazon Web Services

  • Increased RDS Data API throughput by up to 16× for read-heavy workloads, in Java on AWS infrastructure.
  • Designed and tested load-balancing heuristics and low-latency query-distribution strategies.
  • Weighed design trade-offs for complex API interactions and shipped the full implementation in Java.

Selected WorkResearch · Modeling · Competitions

AI Safety Research

Redwood Research AI Safety Fellowship, Cambridge MARS

Nov 2025 - Mar 2026

  • Developed stronger red-team attack policies to support more rigorous AI control evaluations.
  • Applied DSPy with GEPA to systematically optimize red-team prompts.
  • Analyzed how late-starting and early-stopping attack policies affect safety across a range of thresholds.
Financial Modeling

IMC Prosperity 3

April 2025

  • Finished in top 0.8% of more than 12,000 competitors worldwide.
  • Modeled and forecast low signal-to-noise market data.
  • Captained a five-person team, dividing responsibilities and driving the final-round submission.
Market Forecasting

Jane Street Real-Time Market Data Forecasting (Kaggle)

Dec 2024 - Jan 2025

  • Built ensemble and feature-engineering pipelines for market prediction.
  • Applied gradient boosting, random forests, neural networks, and other modeling techniques.
  • Combined multiple sub-models to improve accuracy and limit catastrophic-error risk.

Awards & DistinctionsCompetitions · Puzzles · Honors

Apr 2026 #1OpenAI Model Craft Challenge / Parameter Golf #1 worldwide out of more than 1,000 participants and more than 2,000 submissions.
Nov 2025 Meta Hacker Cup 2025 Reached Round 3 and Top 200: #14 in the USA, #183 of 13,779 worldwide.
Apr 2025 IMC Prosperity Trading Competition Ranked #102 of 12,620 worldwide and #30 in the United States.
Apr 2025 MIT Informatics Tournament Advanced to the invitational round.
Oct 2024 Lucid Programming Competition Won a prize for contest performance.
Sep 2024 Jane Street Puzzles Listed on the Jane Street puzzle leaderboard five times.
Sep 2024 Phi Beta Kappa Inducted into the national academic honor society.
May 2021 National Merit Scholarship Named a National Merit Scholar.
2019 - 2021 USACO Platinum & AIME Qualifier Promoted to USACO Platinum; qualified for the AIME via the AMC 12.

EducationUNC Chapel Hill · Class of 2025

Computer ScienceHighest Distinction · 4.00 GPA

Honors

Graduated with Highest Distinction

4.00 GPA, Dean's List, Phi Beta Kappa, and National Merit Scholar.

Publication

Demystifying NVIDIA GPU Internals to Enable Reliable GPU Management

Proceedings of the 30th IEEE Real-Time and Embedded Technology and Applications Symposium (RTAS), May 2024.

Skills & Interests

Languages

PythonC#JavaCC++Rust

Frameworks & Libraries

TransformerLensPyTorchCUDADSPyPandasPolarsNumPyscikit-learnTensorFlow

Interests

Competitive ProgrammingAI Safety & AlignmentStudent Government

ContactOpen to interesting problems

Build, model, evaluate.

Emailben@bsh.dev GitHubgithub.com/codemath3000 LinkedInlinkedin.com/in/benjamin-hadad