Hey, I'm Makan (think Porsche Macan, if that helps). I spent the past ~3 years as a founding ML engineer at
Brightwave, building production agentic systems end to end.
Before that I spent ~4 years doing applied ML research at Seagate across hard drive design and manufacturing. My graduate research was on the intersection of machine learning and complex networks,
advised by Dr. Kevin S. Xu.
I've been living in Colorado for a while now, enjoying skiing, mountain biking, and most recently riding my motorcycle
in the canyons. I also play pickup soccer when I'm not injured :)
You can reach me at .
Timeline
2023 – 2026
Brightwave· Founding Machine Learning Engineer
I joined the two founders as the first hire and helped bring the product from an idea to production,
building many of its core systems along the way, growing it into a workspace where teams collaborate
in shared projects spanning 10k+ sources each and run long-horizon agentic workflows.
2020 – 2023
Seagate· MLE Intern → MLE II → Senior MLE
I started on the internal ML team working on hard drive test reliability and efficiency in manufacturing, and storage-domain NLP,
and later joined the Seagate Research Group to work on ML-accelerated design of recording media.
2016 – 2020
IDEAS Lab, University of Toledo· Research Assistant
I studied generative models of link formation in dynamic networks, and was a founding
contributor of DyNetworkX.
2013 – 2020
University of Toledo· B.S. & M.S.E., Computer Science & Engineering
Selected Publications
M. Arastuie, S. Paul, K. Xu.
“CHIP: A Hawkes Process Model for Continuous-time Networks with Scalable and Consistent Estimation.”
NeurIPS, 2020. paper ·
arXiv ·
code ·
spotlight video
M. Arastuie, K. Xu.
“Personalized Degrees: Effects on Link Formation in Dynamic Networks from an Egocentric Perspective.”
The Web Conference (WWW) Companion, 2019. arXiv ·
code
