Najam Ahmed Ansari
Verified Expert in Engineering
Software Developer
Najam is a back-end engineer who loves building products that are robust and scale well. He's worked with multiple startups (including a Y Combinator-backed one) and enterprises to transform their business processes into functioning software. He brings value not just to your technology stack but also to products as a whole, improving user flows and interactions. His experience with the Scrum framework makes him a good fit for any Agile setup.
Portfolio
Experience
Availability
Preferred Environment
Git, Sublime Text, Fedora
The most amazing...
...thing I've created is a scalable, asynchronous media ingestion system for Artstor that processes 3,000+ documents, images, audios, videos, and panoramas daily.
Work Experience
Co-founder | CTO | Consultant
StackWeavers
- Worked on charting technology roadmap and OKRs for the organization.
- Did the recruitment and selection of software engineers, QA engineers, and project managers.
- Engaged with startups and enterprises for business development. Used Piwik for web analytics in some projects.
- Designed robust full-stack solutions that bring clients’ ideas to life.
Senior Developer
Sovren
- Developed a fully typed and tested Python SDK for the client's REST API.
- Assisted the client in navigating challenges around publishing their project on the Python Package Index (PyPI).
- Ensured project compatibility across different Python versions (3.7 onwards) and operating systems (Windows and *nix).
Senior Django Developer
Cantieri Digitali Medtech srl
- Developed enhancements to the Django admin experience per the client's requirements.
- Provided guidance on Django best practices and patterns.
- Implemented ViewSets and Serializers in DRF as per the client's requirements.
Director of Engineering and Security
Spekit, Inc.
- Built out the MVP and scaled it up to a full-fledged product used by clients at leading financial, healthcare, and technology companies.
- Scaled up engineering team from two to 20+ infrastructure, software, and quality assurance engineers, charting their career progression, remuneration, and professional growth.
- Collaborated on security hardening of company systems and processes in line with established standards (ISO 27001).
- Wrote company policies and practices thoroughly to withstand rigorous audits, culminating in a successful SOC2 - Type II certification by the end of our third year.
- Cooperated with the leadership team to navigate struggles and steer the company from seed stage to Series A.
- Performed the following integrations: Salesforce (API integrations and Canvas App), Slack, Outlook, and Segment.
Python Developer
Rightprice AI (via Toptal)
- Designed a heavily configurable permissions system on top of Flask Principal.
- Integrated a custom Flask app with a Dash app.
- Developed a React front end for user management.
Senior Software Engineer
Mentat (Y Combinator 2016)
- Implemented Stripe payment, payment rejection, and subscriptions work-flows through API and web-hooks, increasing monthly revenue by 33% and eliminating losses due to failed payments.
- Revamped onboarding process to improve UX increasing user sign-ups by 12%.
- Rewrote existing search implementations (Elasticsearch and MongoDB) to improve accuracy and latency, cutting down churn rate by 20%.
- Worked on various code and database level optimizations resulting in >65% reduction in response times and faster page loads.
- Worked on Google Analytics, Mixpanel, Autopilot integrations to monitor user flow through the platform, resulting in better insight for product managers.
Senior Software Engineer
Active Capital IT
- Mentored a team of three software engineers—helping them enhance their skill sets and deliver world-class software to our client.
- Implemented best practices and coding standards via peer-based code reviews.
- Architected a general-purpose multimedia viewing platform for a client's proprietary system.
- Rewrote a legacy multimedia system from scratch as a massively scalable Flask-based API with Celery workers for background processing and Nginx for load-balancing, content upload, and download and checksum computation.
- Developed a COUNTER and SUSHI compliant reporting system in Python.
- Managed multiple on-prem Kaltura server instances.
- Developed IIIF (IIIF.io) based-image and manuscript viewing environments.
Applications Engineer
Sensys Inc
- Introduced new features into the company's SCADA software by designing workflows and interfaces and taking them through the development lifecycle.
- Engineered solutions to meet new requirements arising from the sales and solutions wings.
- Automated the generation of work orders and posting of run hours to enterprise systems (SAP PM, IBM Maximo) by integrating them with the plant floor (SCADA, DCS, PLCs).
- Developed a mobile app for industrial handheld computers which enabled workers to post measurements to SCADA directly from the field.
- Generated Excel reports from real-time and historic plant floor data.
Experience
Mirador Viewing Environment for Shared Shelf Commons
Multimedia Ingestion System
The new solution was designed to be massively scalable. The web and background processes could be run on separate servers and all communications between the two were handled via RabbitMQ. The process was optimized so that Nginx would handle the file uploads inside a TMPFS mount, then run checksum calculations, and forward the request to Flask. Flask would then run some initial tests to ensure that the files weren't corrupted, create relevant database entries for the files, move them to our NAS drive, and create a background job for processing the files. Nginx was also used for serving static and external media, thus freeing up the Flask workers. We also used the ELK stack (Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana) for generating insights from our logs.
Spekit
https://spekit.comEducation
Bachelor of Science Degree in Electronic Engineering
Ghulam Ishaq Khan Institute of Engineering Sciences and Technology - Topi, Pakistan
Skills
Libraries/APIs
SQLAlchemy, React, Google Geocoding API, Google Maps API, Node.js, Stripe API, Segment.io, Requests, Django ORM, Salesforce REST API, Pydantic, REST APIs
Tools
Git, Asana, Jenkins, Google Analytics, Celery, Kibana, Piwik, NGINX, Subversion (SVN), Bitbucket, lighttpd, Cron, Monit, Behave, Sublime Text, OpenSeadragon, Puppet, AWS ELB, Amazon CloudFront CDN, Sentry, Apache HTTP Server, Trello, Jira, Redmine, Logstash, RabbitMQ, Mongoose, Kue, Mailchimp, SendGrid, PyPI, GitHub
Frameworks
Flask, Django REST Framework, Django, Swagger, Express.js, Jakarta Server Pages (JSP), Ext JS, JSON Web Tokens (JWT), React Native, Sphinx Documentation Generator
Languages
Python, Markdown, JavaScript, Regex, TypeScript, Python 3, SOQL, Erlang, SQL, Bash, VBScript
Paradigms
Agile Software Development, Web Architecture, REST, Behavior-driven Development (BDD), Test-driven Development (TDD), Role-based Access Control (RBAC)
Platforms
Linux, New Relic, Heroku, Fedora, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Amazon EC2, Docker, Salesforce, Kaltura, Mixpanel, Mandrill
Storage
PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Elasticsearch, Azure SQL, Microsoft SQL Server, Amazon S3 (AWS S3), MySQL, SQLite, Redis, PostGIS, Datadog
Other
Webhooks, Gunicorn, Slack App, Back-end, APIs, Architecture, Technical Leadership, Third-party Integration, Third-party APIs, Bluebird, Ubuntu Server, Tornado, Stripe Payments, Bitbucket Pipelines, OPC Data Access, OPC UA, Libraries, Metadata, Salesforce Enterprise Edition, Autoscaling, Amazon Route 53, Logz.io, Autopilot, Load Balancers, HAProxy, CORS, Dash, FontAwesome, SOC 2, ISO 27001, Fail2Ban, Woopra, Amplitude, Segment, Amazon RDS, AWS Auto Scaling, SDKs, GitHub Actions, Typing, Full-stack
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