Nicholas Ayat

I'm Nicholas Ayat, a Computer Science student at UC Santa Cruz with a 4.0 GPA, graduating a year early in 2026.

Last summer I interned at Jefferies in New York as a Quantitative Risk Engineer. I built AIRA (AI Risk Assistant), an NLP-powered interface that let trading and risk teams query credit exposures and portfolio sensitivities in plain language, replacing workflows that used to require manual pulls. I also engineered low-latency data pipelines for real-time risk calculations and deployed containerized microservices on AWS. They extended a return offer.

Before Jefferies, I led a machine learning research team at Sonoma State, where I built a predictive system to identify at-risk students from attendance patterns. I rewrote core components in C++ for speed, built the API layer with caching for fast lookups, and automated the full retraining pipeline end to end.

On my own time, I built NickelPal, an automated trading platform that runs ML models against live market feeds.

I do my best work on difficult, data-intensive problems close to production that, when solved, result in a tangible impact.

Outside of school, I compose and produce music for various artists and hike around Santa Cruz. Feel free to check out my projects or contact me below.