Fawaz Farid

Co-founder & Full-Stack Engineer
Nairobi, Kenya.

About

Software Engineer with 8+ years of experience crafting scalable and user-friendly web applications. I'm big on clean code and performance, and I thrive in remote Agile teams. I have a strong passion for the web, design, and anything that’s productive, enjoyable, and easy to use.

Work

Chan Zuckerberg Initiative
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Contract Software Engineer

Summary

Contributed to the Summit Learning Platform, a personalized learning SaaS tool, by delivering key features and bug fixes.

Highlights

Built a Custom Student Groups tool using Rails and React, enabling teachers and coaches to track 10–20 students, boosting classroom usage by ~15%.

Shipped 8+ bug fixes, resolved goal-tracking glitches, and improved overall platform uptime.

Worked on the Rails back-end, optimized MySQL queries, and added indexes, reducing load times for group data.

Joined a remote Agile team and collaborated with developers and product managers to deliver consistently within 2-week sprints.

Andela
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Software Engineer

Summary

Provided full-stack engineering expertise to various partner projects and internal tools as part of a global talent network, consistently delivering scalable solutions.

Highlights

Built an internal grading tool with Rails and React, tracking 200+ Bootcamp candidates and cutting admin time by 40%.

Led and mentored a team of 8 new engineers, successfully shipping an internal tool from scratch with Python/Django in 3 months.

Contributed to open-source projects, improving the company's community libraries.

Shipped features for partners (e.g., CZI’s Student Groups, Rentgrata’s chat), which helped grow user engagement by ~15–30% across projects.

Wrote comprehensive documentation and onboarded 10+ engineers, halving ramp-up time to 2 weeks.

Worked remotely in Agile sprints, consistently delivering for partners and Andela on 2–4 week cycles.

Participated in the candidate selection process by conducting technical interviews.

Ujenzi
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Co-founder & Full-Stack Engineer

Summary

Co-founded a SaaS platform for construction project management, leading end-to-end technical development, infrastructure, product, and design from inception.

Highlights

Designed and coded front-end UI with JavaScript, Hotwire (Turbo, Stimulus), HTML, CSS, and Tailwind, cutting page load times by 40% for an enhanced user experience.

Led back-end development in Ruby on Rails, building features like task assignments, activity logs, and project scheduling (Gantt and Kanban views), boosting user adoption by 25%.

Set up a Postgres database and optimized key tables (e.g., projects, tasks) with indexing, speeding up queries by approximately 60%.

Migrated background jobs from Sidekiq/Redis to Solid Queue, cutting infrastructure costs by approximately 15% and simplifying setup.

Shipped auto-generated letter avatars for users and organizations, as well as social avatars for social sign-ups, significantly improving the onboarding flow.

Designed and built an organization context switcher using Turbo, making switching 50% faster for multi-organization users.

Introduced the Shape Up Methodology, ensuring on-time delivery of focused projects like the 'projects' feature within each 6-week cycle.

Ensured clean, maintainable code with RSpec and Capybara tests and consistent linting, reducing bugs by approximately 30%.

Netlify
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Back-End Engineer

Summary

Delivered critical back-end features for enterprise customers and optimized developer workflows on a leading cloud platform for web app deployment.

Highlights

Shipped the Log Drains feature in Golang and Rails, batching Lambda logs with Redis and sending them to Datadog/S3, increasing enterprise users by ~20% and reducing monitoring setup time by ~30%.

Led back-end development for site builds and deployments via Azure DevOps, a highly requested feature, optimizing pipelines and reducing deployment failures by ~25%.

Tuned MongoDB queries by addressing N+1 issues and adding indexes, improving load times on key pages by ~20% and maintaining 99.9% uptime for enterprise sites.

Added log colorization by level (e.g., error, info) and implemented timeframe filtering, enhancing debugging speed for developers by ~15%.

Built collaborative deploy previews for Azure DevOps, shipping 50+ previews daily, significantly improving team feedback loops.

Prepared the platform for GitLab v15 changes, achieving zero downtime during the transition.

Resolved common pain points in the company's Forms (e.g., spam filtering), reducing related support tickets by ~10%.

Laid back-end foundation for custom subdomains with AWS, enabling adoption by 20+ early users.

Worked remotely in Agile sprints, collaborating closely with SRE, Product, and Design teams to streamline processes and reduce support calls by 15%.

GitHub Inc.
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Contract Software Engineer

Summary

Contributed to the New User Experience and Growth teams, implementing A/B tested features to enhance user retention and feature adoption for a leading developer platform.

Highlights

Built onboarding pages using Rails and JavaScript, boosting user sign-ups and reducing churn by ~20%.

Shipped email invite functionality for non-GitHub users to join repositories, adding role assignment after signup, increasing sign-ups by ~20% within 3 months.

Created an organization checklist feature, driving ~25% growth in feature adoption and reducing churn by ~10%.

Improved the pricing page with a plan toggle, accelerating user decision-making and leading to a ~5% increase in upgrades.

Cleaned up unused feature flags and removed dead code, eliminating 100+ unnecessary MySQL calls and reducing page load time by up to ~30%.

Maintained code quality through peer reviews and Minitest coverage, which helped lower the bug rate across key areas.

Rentgrata
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Contract Full-Stack Software Engineer

Summary

Developed and scaled customer-facing features for a SaaS platform connecting renters with residents, focusing on boosting sign-ups and streamlining operations.

Highlights

Redesigned the chat system using Rails, Turbo, and jQuery/Ajax; added a sign-up flow that increased user registrations by ~25%.

Built a REST API sync with Entrata, automating the generation of 100+ apartment listings monthly and cutting manual updates by ~50%.

Created a chat plugin API with Rails and JavaScript and embedded it on property sites, resulting in a ~20% lift in sign-ups.

Set up the first unit and integration tests using RSpec, significantly reducing bugs and promoting a culture of testing.

Shipped a Facebook sign-up flow, accelerating onboarding and contributing to a 15% increase in users.

Fixed 10+ critical bugs and maintained 99% uptime for chat and listing services.

Wrote onboarding documentation, trained three new engineers, and cut their ramp-up time in half.

Introduced staging and feature branch deploys on Heroku, reducing production errors by ~40%.

Greatspan Maritime Services Ltd
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Web Developer Intern

Summary

As the sole developer, built a web application from scratch to help clients track shipping containers and vessels, handling both front-end and back-end development.

Highlights

Designed and coded the platform using Laravel and PHP, tracking 100+ containers monthly for over 10 clients.

Built the front-end with JavaScript and jQuery, accelerating data entry through real-time updates.

Set up the MySQL database and indexed container IDs and vessel logs for faster queries.

Deployed the application independently and managed server setup, configuration, and ongoing updates.

Education

Maseno University

Bachelor of Science

Mathematics and Computer Science

Skills

Programming Languages

Ruby, JavaScript, Python, Golang, PHP.

Web Frameworks

Ruby on Rails, React, Hotwire (Turbo, Stimulus), Django, Laravel, Flask, jQuery, Ajax.

Databases

PostgreSQL, MySQL, MongoDB, Redis.

Cloud & DevOps

AWS, Heroku, Docker, Fly.io, Azure DevOps, Infrastructure Management.

Testing & Quality Assurance

RSpec, Capybara, Minitest, Unit Testing, Integration Testing, Code Quality, Linting.

Methodologies & Tools

Agile Methodologies, Scrum, Shape Up Methodology, A/B Testing (Optimizely), REST API Design, System Design, Product Management, Technical Leadership, Mentorship, Technical Interviews.

Front-end Technologies

HTML, CSS, Tailwind CSS.

Other Technologies

OpenAI API, Apache Kafka, Flow.

Projects

M-Pesa Ruby

Summary

An open-source library connecting Ruby applications to Safaricom’s M-PESA APIs for seamless payments and transactions, simplifying integration for developers.

BookBot

Summary

An experimental AI-powered project designed to make book content more accessible, built solo using Rails, React, and OpenAI for AI-driven search and summarization.