Shafik Quoraishee

Shafik Quoraishee is a machine learning engineer, game developer, and technical writer currently working as a Staff Games ML Engineer at The New York Times. His work there focuses on AI and tooling for games including Wordle, Connections, Strands, and Crosswords. He has contributed to internal puzzle analysis systems, multiplayer game features, and experimental ML systems tied to gameplay and accessibility.Before joining the Times, he worked across media and entertainment companies including the National Basketball Association, Business Insider, and MTV / Viacom, where his engineering work centered on mobile experiences, game systems, and machine learning applications in consumer products.Earlier in his career, he also worked as a research engineer with the U.S. Department of Defense on intelligent sensor systems and related military research projects.Outside of industry roles, he has published technical writing and research-oriented articles on topics such as handwriting recognition, neural networks, visual question answering, facial recognition, computational modeling, and AI reasoning. He has spoken at developer and AI conferences, including discussions about how AI systems solve games like Connections and what those limitations reveal about reasoning and cognition.His broader interests appear to span machine learning, computational biology, physics, simulation systems, and generative AI.