CTO
2021 - 2022TSLC- Shipped and centralized core APIs and SDKs across ventures to aid international expansion, similar to a Delivery Hero model.
- Consolidated the venture builder's IP around ML-driven creditworthiness and scoring using alternative data and rendered the IP consumable by all of the ventures in the venture builder’s network.
- Implemented Domain Driven Design (DDD) approach to architecture and, consequently, agile team structure. As a result, all systems implemented were pure distributed systems based on event-driven architecture.
- Created the analytics and data engineering pipelines consumed by the growth and product teams and the creditworthiness team for the ML training model.
- Grew the engineering team to a 40+ headcount by hiring and changing the interview process to be a more methodical and rigorous academic interview process, streamlining the hiring of high-quality engineers.
- Implemented agile teams and software delivery process restructured into domain-based teams with bounded contexts. Streamlined an embedded lending product launch with local partners in the UAE, Mexico, Colombia, Bangladesh, and Brazil within 12 months.
- Established domain-based OKRs for the engineering team by working closely with the product team and aligning to the product roadmap strategically. This empowered every team to naturally 'look around the corner.
- Created the engineering competency matrix to objectively calibrate engineers into different levels of seniority for both ICs and engineering managers. Defined seniority levels, key areas aligned with company values, attributes, and competencies.
- Enhanced the performance review process by implementing a quarterly check-in and connect program and open 360-degree feedback. Managers were encouraged to be more methodical in their approach to their weekly one-on-ones.
- Developed a structured process around performing technical due diligence on external API vendor integration, product know-how, engineering best practices, and processes (OpenAPI AsyncAPI documentation and code-review).
Technologies: Go, Gorm, Apache Kafka, Elasticsearch, Redis, Amazon DynamoDB, Cassandra, Apache Cassandra, Kubernetes, Amazon EKS, Argo CD, Flutter, GraphQL, gRPC, Protobuf, GitHub API, GitOps, GitHub, Amazon Simple Email Service (SES), Twilio API, Distributed Architecture, Distributed Systems, Clean Architecture, OAuth 2, APIs, Microservices, Microservices Architecture, Amazon Web Services (AWS)Founder, CEO
2020 - 2021SensFi- Established and incorporated SensFi Inc. as the first true open finance API for businesses in Africa and the Middle East.
- Implemented multiple bank integrations, which leveraged custom automated scraping and indexed user banking data into our finance store.
- Extracted company inventory, receivables and payables, and any other data points available in a given ERP business integration. Implemented multiple ERP integrations.
- Hired the team which leveraged the data extracted from business banking integrations and ERP integrations to reconstruct a given business' financial statements such as balance sheets and income statements.
- Implemented the initial GraphQL layer for other financial institutions to integrate their back-office and compliance tooling to our Data API so that they could automate their flagging and risk processes.
Technologies: Go, ScyllaDB, Elasticsearch, Protobuf, Apache Kafka, Logstash, Kibana, Redis, Kubernetes, GitOps, Argo CD, GitHub, GraphQL, OAuth 2, Distributed Architecture, Distributed Systems, Clean Architecture, APIs, Microservices, Microservices Architecture, Amazon Web Services (AWS)CTO
2017 - 2020Wahed Inc (Wahedinvest)- Built an event-driven microservice architecture that is distributed, concurrent, and highly available with a GraphQL API interface for internal and external consumption.
- Architected and designed a fully distributed system using DDD, resulting in an event-driven architecture.
- Built resilient services by implementing a Dead Letter Queue and a RetryEvent service which all consumed and retried events on our event bus (Kafka) achieved self-healing and auto-reconciliation mechanisms to recover from issues automatically.
- Deployed to a Kubernetes orchestrated cluster in production, managing over 100 microservice instances.
- Grew the engineering team from zero to 19 when I introduced the company to a rigorous academic interview process and loop.
- Built the blueprint for launching Wahed’s robo-advisor in new jurisdictions from a product offering side, seeing efficient AUM generation in new jurisdictions.
- Created the underlying processes for the back-office operations related to Wahed’s global robo advisor offering (132 countries), acting as the unofficial head of operations for non-US offerings.
- Created the roadmap for Wahed to scale staffing globally.
- Served as the only C-level from all management other than the founder, who actively participated in the board meetings to represent technology, product, and operations for the Wahed board.
Technologies: Go, Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana, Apache Kafka, GraphQL, Protobuf, gRPC, Java, Scala, React Native, React, TypeScript, PostgreSQL, Redis, Cassandra, Apache Cassandra, CircleCI, GitHub, Kubernetes, Kubernetes Operations (Kops), Spinnaker, Distributed Architecture, Distributed Systems, Clean Architecture, OAuth 2, APIs, Microservices, Microservices Architecture, Amazon Web Services (AWS)Software Engineer
2014 - 2017Microsoft- Shipped several Windows operating system versions, and worked across the Windows stack.
- Contributed to and shipped multiple versions of Microsoft's Computer Vision-based ImageReco on the Photos app in collaboration with Microsoft Research. This resulted in higher app ratings and orders of magnitude of app users across the Windows ecosystem.
- Refactored and rewrote parts of the Windows file indexer to increase speed and accurately coalesced file modification notifications resulting in 30x faster file indexing and precise file modification API notifications for consumer apps.
Technologies: C++, C#, Machine Learning, Computer Vision, Caffe, Deep Learning, Convolutional Neural Networks, Kernel Programming, Multithreading, Clean Architecture, APIs, Microservices, Microservices ArchitectureSoftware Engineer (intern)
2013 - 2013Microsoft- Developed an NLP (Natural Language Processing) language model for the Windows 8 soft keyboard.
- Implemented a machine translation layer on top of the NLP model I created to aid in language modeling and text prediction in the Windows 8 soft keyboard.
- Ported my NLP and machine translation language model and text prediction to the WIndows 8 Mobile keyboard.
Technologies: C++, C#Software Engineer (intern)
2012 - 2012Microsoft- Ported a legacy version of a Windows handwriting recognition library to the Modern Windows 8 stack such that sandboxed apps could consume it.
- Extended the port of the Windows handwriting recognition library by implementing support for recognizing mathematical expressions (introductory algebra and some calculus).
- Utilized the port and my own extension on top and shipped a consumer app within the Windows ecosystem, allowing users to handwrite mathematical expressions and automatically solve them (MathSolver).
Technologies: C++, C#Java Software Developer
2011 - 2012IntelTraff- Implemented a simulator for automating the generation of internet browsing and packet data.
- Designed and implemented a pipeline for packet data collection to supply network flow stats as training data for performing VPN detection.
- Exposed and maintained a REST API interface for triggering simulation of packet data generation as well as performing prediction for VPN detection.
Technologies: Java, APIsJava Developer
2010 - 2011TapiCal- Served as a Java developer for an early-stage startup creating a calendar sharing app for iCalendar, using Amazon SQS and JAMES mail server.
- Implemented the first pipeline for extracting calendar data, transforming it, and pushing it onto SQS for downstream services to pick up.
- Implemented one of the downstream services for handling the calendar email distribution flow, such that all participants in the calendar invite received an email notification.
Technologies: Java, Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS), Apache James Server, Objective-C, APIs