
Khaled El-Fakharany
Verified Expert in Engineering
AI Engineer and Developer
Manchester, United Kingdom
Toptal member since May 4, 2020
Khaled is a principal AI engineer and CTO with 12 years of experience. He was a senior engineer on the native rebuild of a media platform used by NBC, CNN and the BBC, cutting 4K transcoding from over 30 minutes to under 2, and led an MVP onto all seven Apple platforms in about four months. As CTO since 2020, he built a VR remote desktop that streams three 4K screens with head tracking under 10 ms. Today he ships agentic AI on the Claude Agent SDK, LangGraph and MCP.
Portfolio
Experience
- Python - 10 years
- Swift - 9 years
- Solution Architecture - 5 years
- TypeScript - 4 years
- Artificial Intelligence (AI) - 3 years
- Agentic AI - 2 years
- Large Language Models (LLMs) - 2 years
- Claude Code - 2 years
Work Experience
Founder and AI Engineer
Self-employed
- Put a multi-agent assistant into daily use by a startup accelerator's two leaders two days after its production project went up, drafting their emails and memos from Airtable, Jira, Microsoft 365 and meeting notes.
- Kept every outward email and status change behind a person's approval that shows the exact message and recipients, a rule enforced by tests in the accelerator assistant.
- Built an orchestration layer over Claude Code, with native SwiftUI apps for Mac and iPhone, that started 741 of 805 AI coding sessions in 29 days.
- Cut paid AI tokens per technical brief from about 4.9 million to zero with a LangGraph quality gate on a local model, and vague acceptance criteria from 27-50% to 4-11%.
- Gave a retail store with no accountant an AI accountant on the Claude Agent SDK that keeps a double-entry ledger from Odoo events and previews every money movement.
- Converted 14% of 1,281 visitors into 183 sign-ups for a public workshop teaching multi-agent systems with LangGraph and the Claude Agent SDK.
- Designed a Postgres career database where every field is a fact with its source and history, with row-level security tested by break-in attempts and local pgvector embeddings.
- Built a demo-ready car-care booking marketplace in 36 hours: a SwiftUI iOS app and a React admin on Supabase, with PostGIS zones and double-entry ledgers under tests.
- Distilled a 27B teacher model into a small student on one 16 GB GPU, from a corpus generated at a 97% accept rate. The student honoured its output contract 98.9% of the time on unseen records.
Engineering Lead
Honestum LLC
- Led the team that shipped an AI-powered lifestyle app's MVP across all seven Apple platforms (iOS, iPadOS, macOS, watchOS, tvOS, visionOS and CarPlay) in about four months.
- Architected one SwiftUI codebase for all seven platforms, sharing the logic and data layer and adapting each interface to its platform through conditional compilation.
- Directed the conversion of external machine-learning models to Core ML, tuned to each platform's hardware, so the app's AI features ran on the device and kept users' data private.
- Designed a voice-first CarPlay interface with SiriKit for hands-free use while driving, and a visionOS experience in RealityKit that shows the user's data in 3D space.
- Guided the app through Apple's review on all seven platforms, including its access to Health and Photos data, and vetted every third-party library's privacy policy.
- Chose SwiftData with iCloud sync for storage, so a user's data followed them across their Apple devices.
CTO and Co-founder
ORKA Solutions
- Co-founded a software house and grew it to 18 developers, delivering for 15 clients over three years and reaching break-even.
- Trained the team in stack-agnostic fundamentals so it could switch stacks for each client, across React, React Native, .NET, Odoo and Shopify.
- Delivered a full ERP for a multi-branch retail chain, with offline-first cloud sync, POS integration and CCTV integration.
- Built a factory ERP for a wood manufacturer on Odoo 18 in about four months, with custom modules from sales to manufacturing, after on-site discovery at the plant.
- Launched Egypt's first fresh-meat online store on Shopify, with full Arabic right-to-left support and ordering by custom cut.
- Delivered a print-on-demand platform across a React Native app, a React web app that works offline and a desktop app for print staff, linked by QR-code uploads.
CTO
CanterVR
- Grew the engineering team from 2 to 20 developers as CTO, keeping rotating freelancers productive with 46 UML diagrams and more than 100 technical documents.
- Architected the four-part platform behind a VR remote desktop: a native Swift macOS server, a Unity VR app for iOS and Android, a React and Next.js website and a Firebase back end.
- Pioneered ARKit spatial tracking in VR at under 10 ms latency and 90 frames a second, for natural head movement.
- Sustained 60-minute VR sessions streaming three 4K screens on phones, with a thermal-management system of tiered fallbacks and dynamic quality scaling.
- Cut keyboard and mouse input to under 50 ms end to end by adding Bluetooth keyboard and mouse support, turning the VR app into a productivity tool.
- Added XR passthrough at 60 frames a second while keeping VR rendering at 90, so users could see their surroundings without taking the headset off.
- Designed a Central Operation Manager, an asynchronous queue system that runs the Unity app like an enterprise platform rather than a game engine.
- Shipped a native macOS server app with working VNC and audio in 11 weeks, after pitching the move from the PyQt desktop app to native Swift.
- Promoted from senior macOS developer to CTO within four months, in November 2020.
- Took the platform to market-ready status, with acquisition offers before its public launch.
macOS Developer
Quill Notes LLC
- Cut transcription delays in a macOS note-taking app within a one-month engagement, after profiling its audio pipeline with Instruments to find the bottlenecks.
- Restructured the AVFoundation pipeline with tuned buffer sizes and parallel Grand Central Dispatch queues, so audio processing ran across multiple CPU cores.
- Moved audio processing onto background queues, so the interface stayed responsive while audio was recorded and transcribed.
- Redesigned the concurrency model with custom dispatch queues and barrier operations, keeping audio data intact under parallel processing.
- Found and fixed memory-management issues in the audio processing chain.
- Added a Swift capture tool to the pipeline that lists Core Audio input devices and records from the chosen microphone.
macOS Developer
B&S Collective Pty Ltd
- Built the macOS controller that runs a commercial photo booth from a Mac mini inside it, driving its payment terminal, printer and camera as one system.
- Cut the power use of booths left running 24/7 in shopping malls with a deep-sleep mode that wakes in milliseconds when a customer walks up, using IOKit power assertions.
- Designed a hybrid IPC layer: XPC services for the critical components, for isolation and crash safety, and command-line control for manufacturer software without XPC support.
- Split the app so SwiftUI drew the kiosk interface while AppKit handled system-level work and the hardware communication.
- Shipped software that runs photo booths at weddings, media events, conferences and mall installations worldwide.
Senior macOS Developer
Mainsail Holding LLC
- Kept a marine navigation app dating from the 1990s working for its commercial users over 13 months, in a codebase that mixed C, Objective-C, Swift and Python.
- Revived dormant features and fixed bugs in the legacy C code, documenting what each undocumented part did before changing it.
- Built new features in Swift by refactoring the Objective-C bridging layer, so modern code could sit beside the C core without destabilizing it.
- Bridged Python libraries into the macOS app to extend it without rewriting its core components.
- Moved the app's Objective-C Backendless code into Swift and added Core Data sync of its backend data.
- Updated dependencies and third-party libraries across the multi-decade codebase without breaking its existing navigation features.
Technical Consultant
Seidr, Ltd.
- Gave a defense-training startup what it needed to hire a development team: a product requirements document, a technical architecture and a phased roadmap.
- Ran discovery sessions with the founder to map military and SWAT training workflows, then specified every feature of the simulation platform in the requirements document.
- Designed the system architecture in C4 context and container diagrams with UML deployment, data and security views, including where AI would drive live training simulations.
- Planned the build in phases from MVP to the full platform, with technology recommendations sized for military-grade reliability.
- Handed the specifications to the development company the client hired, in a knowledge-transfer session.
Senior iOS Developer
Airmee
- Delivered offline support for a courier app in six weeks, so couriers could photograph, scan and confirm deliveries inside buildings with no network.
- Built a background sync service on BGTaskScheduler with heartbeat monitoring that kept running with the phone locked in a courier's pocket and synced when the network returned.
- Designed a chronological sync queue with idempotent operations, checks on both the device and the server, and fallbacks for duplicate or invalid data.
- Combined SQLite, Core Data and NSCache in one storage layer, each holding what it suits best: offline records, the object graph and temporary photos.
- Solved it entirely inside the iOS app with zero back-end changes, which removed server-side coordination and cut deployment risk.
Senior macOS Developer
Axle.ai
- Cut 4K transcoding from over 30 minutes to under 2 by rebuilding a five-year-old browser-based media platform as a native macOS app in six months, from its first commit.
- Cut search across 10,000+ media assets from seconds to milliseconds with a Core Data model built on compound indexes, SQLite FTS5 full-text search and denormalized search tables.
- Moved broadcasters including NBC, CNN, the BBC and The Times from overnight batch metadata extraction to real time, bridging exiv2 and Adobe XMP into Swift through Objective-C++.
- Wrapped FFmpeg 4.1 for Swift with VideoToolbox hardware encoding for broadcast formats such as ProRes, DNxHD and XDCAM, plus filmstrip thumbnails with hover scrubbing.
- Added object recognition with a Core ML ResNet50 model on extracted frames and Deepgram speech-to-text, saving detected objects and transcripts to Core Data for search.
- Shipped Ascribe, a transcription SDK built as a reusable framework, which launched as a Dropbox integration in May 2020 and opened a content-creator market beyond enterprise clients.
- Built a tiered Grand Central Dispatch queue architecture with thermal monitoring and resource-contention control for parallel processing of files tens of gigabytes in size.
- Promoted from macOS developer to senior developer within six months, after delivering the native rebuild.
Mobile Developer and Innovation Lead
CatchSmart
- Led an indoor positioning system that tracked more than 1,000 workers at 82% accuracy, against 61.3% and 59% for two academic teams, with 3,000 beacons deployed in a 10-day push. Rolls-Royce Finland's CTO pursued licensing it.
- Launched the CatchPay marketplace to 20 shops and 500 users in its first week, after building its native iOS app from scratch in three months as the sole iOS developer. The platform was later acquired.
- Shipped Latvia's first ARKit app in three weeks, during ARKit's first month, reaching 250+ beta testers at a marketing event with 50 face masks and animated surface scenes.
- Scaled a factory quality app to three timber plants logging 1,000 to 2,000 inspections a day, building React Native screens with custom Swift and Kotlin native modules.
- Ended the crashes, memory leaks and infinite loops in factory scanning by replacing open-source camera and barcode libraries with custom native modules.
- Kept inspections working without a connection through offline-first sync, so records stayed complete for compliance audits in plants with poor coverage.
- Made beacon positioning reliable in metal-heavy plants, where structures carried Bluetooth signals across the floor, with custom signal filtering, zone clustering and path prediction.
- Delivered an eCommerce app that passed 10,000 local downloads, one of four production apps shipped as the company's sole iOS developer.
- Rose from junior developer to reporting directly to the CEO within six months, joining executive discussions and business trips for the parent group.
R&D Engineer
Adam.ai
- Built a person-recognition module with OpenCV that identified meeting participants from video, for an AI meeting assistant that took notes and assigned tasks.
- Benchmarked NLP and computer-vision models for accuracy and performance, and turned the results into recommendations that informed the product's technical direction.
- Tested SDK integrations for meeting transcription and participant recognition, to choose the strongest machine-learning services for the platform.
- Researched product-market fit to separate essential features from nice-to-haves, which shaped the product roadmap.
- Designed and built the assistant's first physical body from sliced MDF, the first physical form of the AI system, and presented it to the parent company's CEO.
Co-founder and Instructor
Qafeer Makerspace
- Co-founded one of the first makerspaces in the Arab world, funded by the region's first successful crowdfunding campaign.
- Taught about 500 students in hands-on engineering courses, and built a model where course projects became work for the makerspace's prototyping services.
- Built a charity vending machine on a Raspberry Pi in three days for the Ramadan TV program Khawater, then deployed it in a busy Cairo mall to collect books, toys and clothes.
- Built a mobile app that let painters control an eight-degrees-of-freedom robotic arm.
- Redesigned the Google Cardboard virtual-reality viewer for higher build quality.
Experience
Multi-agent Assistant for an Accelerator's Leaders
Orchestration System Behind 805 AI Coding Sessions
Local-model Quality Gate for the Jira Backlog
AI Operations Layer for a Retail Store
Offline-first ERP for a Multi-branch Retail Chain
Odoo 18 ERP for a Wood Manufacturer
CatchPay iOS Marketplace, 500 Users in Week One
Ascribe, Professional Transcription SDK (Launched as a Dropbox Integration)
BConfident, AI Video Interview Analysis
InstaPrint, Print-on-demand Across Phone, Web and Desktop
AskDucks, Marketplace Matching International Students
Education
Bachelor's Degree in Computer Control and Computer Science
Riga Technical University - Riga, Latvia
Bachelor's Degree in Computer Engineering
Nile University - Cairo, Egypt
Skills
Libraries/APIs
CocoaPods, REST APIs, Node.js, Core Image, React, PyQt 5, Liquid, Google Maps SDK, Stripe, Alamofire, FFmpeg, Dropbox API, llama.cpp, PyTorch, Pydantic, API Development, Playwright, Telegram Bot API, HealthKit, PhotoKit, Core Audio, OpenCV
Tools
Xcode, Git, Claude Code, Figma, Amazon Cognito, SendGrid, SOLIDWORKS, GitHub, Jira, Blender, Odoo, OneSignal, TestFlight, Crashlytics, Grand Central Dispatch, Instruments, Redux Toolkit, Mermaid, Claude Agent SDK, Claude, Vitest, Sirikit, Apple Vision Pro, LLDB, Interface Builder, Firebase Authentication, GitLab CI/CD
Languages
Swift, JavaScript, HTML, SQL, TypeScript, Objective-C, C++, Python, Dart, Java, Swift 5, C, Embedded C, Kotlin, C#, UML, Shopify Liquid
Frameworks
ARKit, React Native, UIKit, SwiftUI, Electron, Unity3D, Flutter, Core Data, Core ML, Cocoa, Unity, .NET, QWeb, LangGraph, Core Bluetooth, Core Location, MapKit, Redux, iOS SceneKit, AppKit, Next.js, Material UI, Agentic Frameworks, CloudKit, RealityKit, WatchKit, XCTest, Accelerate, C4 Model, Express.js, JSON Web Tokens (JWT)
Paradigms
Mobile App Design, Agile, Desktop App Development, Agile Software Development, Cross-platform, Requirements Analysis, Microservices, Database Design, Mobile Development, Scrum, Automation, Object-oriented Programming (OOP), Thermal Management, Model Context Protocol (MCP), Automated Testing, Concurrent Programming, Refactoring, Interoperability, Affective Computing, B2B
Platforms
Google VR, iOS, MacOS, Mobile, Bluetooth Low Energy (LE), Firebase, ARCore, Android, Apple Watch, Amazon Web Services (AWS), AWS Lambda, WatchOS, iCloud, Linux, Desktop, Shopify, Raspberry Pi, Docker, VisionOS, tvOS, Backendless, Harness
Storage
Database Architecture, SQLite, MongoDB, Amazon DynamoDB, PostgreSQL, Databases, Cloud Firestore, PostGIS, Data Synchronization
Other
Artificial Intelligence (AI), Algorithms, Mobile App Development, Project Design & Management, Architecture, Technical Hiring, Source Code Review, Interviewing, Code Review, Full-stack, Video Streaming, Audio, Mobile Architecture, Technical Leadership, Accessibility, Location Services, Leadership, Software Design, Native Mobile Apps, Startups, Software Architecture, VNC, Technical Consulting, APIs, Minimum Viable Product (MVP), User Experience (UX), Mobile Applications, API Integration, System Architecture, System Integration, Back-end Development, Mobile Apps, Solution Architecture, Full-stack Development, Back-end, Large Language Models (LLMs), Agentic AI, Image Manipulation, Video Editing, AVFoundation, CTO, eCommerce, Cloud Infrastructure, Wearables, Software Development, Machine Learning, Networking, Computer Engineering, Robotics, Computer Vision, IT Project Management, R&D, Amazon API Gateway, ML Kit, Cloud Architecture, Internet Protocols, Remote Desktop, Audio Streaming, Virtual Reality (VR), CI/CD Pipelines, Siri, Debugging, Simulations, Rendering, 3D Modeling, SDKs, iOS App Development, Audio Engines, POS, Payment APIs, Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), PWA, QR Codes, WiFi, Pathing, Sensor Data, AI Algorithms, Firebase Cloud Functions, Supabase, Research, Data Structures, Operating Systems, Computer Graphics, Software Engineering, Signal Processing, Linear Algebra, Statistics, Calculus, Engineering Design, Entrepreneurship, Programming, Embedded Systems, Mentorship, Augmented Reality (AR), Internet of Things (IoT), Indoor Positioning Systems, ESP32, Multithreading, Memory Management, Performance Optimization, Deepgram, Speech-to-Text (STT), Transcription, Full-text Search, Metadata, Video Processing, VLCKit, VideoToolbox, RealVNC, Team Leadership, Technical Documentation, Extended Reality (XR), Bluetooth, AI Agents, LangChain, LLM Integration, Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI), Agentic Coding, AI-assisted Development, Retrieval-augmented Generation (RAG), Vector Search, Pgvector, Prompt Engineering, AI Architecture, AI Governance, Workflow Automation, AI Automation, Knowledge Graphs, LLM Fine-tuning, Hugging Face, FastAPI, Cloudflare, Dashboards, Data Visualization, Design Systems, Airtable, Microsoft Graph API, System Design, Unsloth, LLM Evaluation, Training, Client Management, Proposals, Progressive Web Applications (PWAs), Offline Data Synchronization, Right-to-Left (RTL) Scripts, CCTV, CarPlay, iPadOS, App Store Connect, Data Privacy, Profiling, Audio Processing, Command-line Interface (CLI), Digital Kiosks, Hardware Integration, XPC, IOKit, Product Requirements Documentation (PRD), Technical Architecture, Security Architecture, Product Roadmaps, Product Discovery, Knowledge Transfer, AI Strategy, GPS, Legacy Code, Background Service Architecture, Push Notifications, Caching, Natural Language Processing, Benchmarking, Market Research, Product Strategy, Prototyping, Crowdfunding, Curriculum Development, Team Mentoring, Inventory Management, Double-entry Bookkeeping, Financial Statements, UPC & Barcodes, Offline Caching, Video Capture, Two-sided Marketplaces, Data Architecture, AI Modeling, Business Strategy, Vite
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