Tanner Aslan

Email: contact@tanneraslan.com
Website: tanneraslan.com
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/tanner-aslan
GitHub: github.com/tanneraslan
Citizenship: U.S.

Education

• BS in Computer Science
• GPA: 3.98 / 4.00
• Courses: Data Structures & Algorithms, Computer Graphics, Machine Learning, Web Systems, Software Design, Statistics and Data Analysis, Foundations of Computer Science, Discrete Mathematics

Work Experience

Front-end Software Engineering Intern – Activation Team

• Led and shipped onboarding experiments that targeted users based on industry vertical, coordinating PM, Analytics, Design & QA.
• Ran a Statsig A/B test with Heap instrumentation to raise first-week activation for Hospitality signups, Klaviyo’s largest non-ecommerce segment.
• Traced an under-enrolling A/B test to an unpopulated upstream field silently excluding 84% of eligible traffic; re-sourced the field and restarted the experiment cleanly rather than report untrusted data, raising daily enrollment 7x.
• Diagnosed and specified the fix for an analytics-pipeline bug (dbt/SQL, Snowflake) that miscounted auto-generated objects as user activations, eliminating a ~38% over-count in core activation metrics and restoring trust in company-wide experiment data.
• Audited 16 non-responsive product surfaces and rebuilt the shared empty-state component around CSS container queries; accepted into the company design system, consolidating ~20 surfaces.
• Moved to backend and infrastructure work for the EU data-residency launch, sweeping every team-owned surface against a US control, filing 9 defects and fixing two EU-only 500s.

Paid Undergraduate Research Assistant (Simulation Engineering)

• Engineered a GPU-accelerated Side-Scan Sonar simulator in NVIDIA Isaac Sim, utilizing NVIDIA Warp to model acoustic backscatter, interference, and volumetric reverberation in real-time.
• Co-authored “OceanSim 2.0,” an accepted IEEE OCEANS 2026 paper demonstrating synthetic acoustic and optical data for training marine perception models.

Full-stack Software Engineering Intern – FanX Checkout Team

• Engineered an Accelerated Checkout feature that persisted user session data, driving a 7% increase in conversion rates, a 14% reduction in checkout steps, and a 2x increase in discount code usage.
• Modernized checkout architecture by supporting a FastAPI migration, refactoring legacy components, and implementing custom Redux middleware to gracefully handle API edge cases and prevent fatal session errors.
• Improved payment method sorting, clarified account linking errors, fixed infinite submission loops, corrected accessibility and mobile UI issues, and moved cart validation to the backend to avoid caching issues.
• Validated checkout experiments with Optimizely, Eppo, and Mixpanel, measuring conversion and funnel impact across releases.

Student Volunteer – SIGGRAPH 2025

• Assisted with conference programs and organization, contributing 16 hours of volunteering over the 6 days of the conference.

Scripting and User Interface Design – Game Development Team

• Co-founded ROBLOX game development studio, amassing 20M+ plays, 15k+ member community, and 2.8k DAU at its peak.
• Earned ~$24,000 from a 30% share of game profits through a custom store offering in-game items and power ups.
• Built an anti-cheat system detecting unnatural player behaviors, reducing cheating reports by ~60%.

Projects

• Building a full-stack progressive web app for UofM students to view real-time dining menus, rate food items, and track nutrition.
• Reverse-engineered the university’s undocumented dining API and built a Python scraper to synchronize data with Supabase.
• Engineered a “Smart Preferences Engine” and a “MaizeMacros” tracking module to dynamically filter and refine meal and dining hall recommendations based on user-defined dietary goals and restrictions.

• Built a custom ECS-based engine in TypeScript that interacts directly with the WebGL 1.0, decoupling rendering data from logic.
• Implemented raymarched atmospheric scattering, HDR, and a PBR pipeline with dynamic water (SSR + refractions) for realistic volumetric lighting.
• Leveraged the fragment shader pipeline to emulate compute shaders, enabling procedural terrain generation within WebGL 1.0.

• Built an open source library of typed React components for shipping WebGL shaders on websites.
• Built with Next.js and deployed with Vercel, bootstrapped with Nextra and using MDX files for documentation.
• Added configurable props to shader components to allow easy customization without ever having to edit the shader source code.

• Collaborated with another student to create StudentVerifier, a Discord bot that uses University of Michigan’s MCommunity API and student emails to verify the identity of students in Discord guilds associated with the university.
• Utilized an SMTP server to send one-time verification codes to student emails, using smtplib to interface with Python.
• Associated unique Discord user IDs to student emails using PostgreSQL database, preventing multiple users from using one email.

• Streamlined page creation by leveraging Nextra with MDX, integrating React components for LaTeX, GLSL shaders, and music.
• Optimized performance and scalability by deploying with Vercel and utilizing Next.js for quick server-side rendering.

• Replaced a summed-Gerstner-wave model with an inverse FFT over an ocean spectrum, following Tessendorf’s approach, for photorealistic wave detail.
• Used compute shaders to calculate ocean wave displacement on 2D texture, achieving a 600% speedup over CPU-based approach.
• Implemented tessellation shaders that reduce mesh detail at distance, creating the illusion of an infinite ocean with minimal impact to visual fidelity and performance.
• Developed a voxel-based flotation model that approximates submerged volumes of complex shapes to calculate drag and buoyancy.

• Implemented minimax search with alpha-beta pruning and move ordering, resulting in a 250% speedup in AI decisions.
• Ranked nearly 1900 ELO on lichess.org when competing against other bots, making it more skilled than ~95% of human players.

• Developed ray marching techniques using signed distance fields to simulate light movement and generate realistic soft shadows.
• Modified shadow calculations to allow subtle color bleeding, emulating photorealistic global illumination without the expense of calculating bounce lighting which allowed the approach to achieve real-time speeds of less than 15 ms per frame.

Technical Skills

• Languages: Python, TypeScript, JavaScript, C++, C, Rust, Java, SQL, GLSL, Slang, Lua, Bash, HTML/CSS, R, LaTeX, C#
• Libraries: React, Next.js, Node.js, Redux, FastAPI, Tailwind, OpenGL, NVIDIA Warp, pandas, Jest, Cypress, React Testing Library
• Tools: Git, Docker, AWS, Postgres, Snowflake, dbt, Statsig, Heap, Mixpanel, Datadog, Vercel, CMake, Figma, Jira, Linear, GitHub, GitLab
• Concepts: System Design, Distributed Systems, REST APIs, Computer Graphics, A/B Testing, Full-Stack, OOP, Design Patterns, Agile