Raza Sayed

As a Senior Software Engineer at Arkose Labs, I am integral to designing and refining the microservices-based backend critical to powering Arkose's advanced security solutions. Leveraging my expertise in Golang and AWS, I deliver scalable, robust services that enhance the security and user experience of products trusted by leading companies like Microsoft, OpenAI, and Snapchat. In this role, I not only contribute to the core technology driving Arkose Labs' success but also mentor emerging talent, ensuring our team remains at the forefront of innovation and excellence in cybersecurity solutions.

I currently work as a Senior Full Stack Engineer at Monetizemore. I am working on building the dashboard called PubGuru which is a SaaS product offered by MonetizeMore to its advertising publisher customers. I work on designing and building new features, maintaining existing ones, doing code reviews and also work closely with the DevOps team to improve and maintain the current CI/CD and DevOps practices used in the organisation. The tech stack is Python, Flask and GraphQL on the backend and React on the frontend. We use Docker in development to run the application including unit tests and the entire application and supporting infrastructure is deployed to the AWS cloud.

I worked as a Senior Software Engineer at Briq and i work on the microservices based backend that powers the entire ELT (Extract, Load, Transform) pipeline used to connect to customers data sources, fetch the data and transform it to make it ready for consumption by downstream apps and services. The microservices are written in Python and Go and deployed in GKE (Google Kubernetes Engine) in Google Cloud. Other Google Cloud services that we use are Cloud Pub/Sub, Cloud Functions, Cloud Storage, Google BigQuery, Google Firestore, Cloud Scheduler etc.

I worked as a Technical Lead Engineer at Patona Technologies Pvt. Ltd. My work involved working as a full stack engineer and also being a technical lead , leading the projects from a technical perspective by defining the architecture, tech stack and closing working with the customers and stake holders in an Agile environment to deliver successful projects. Also involved in mentoring the team members and working with the team to ensure high quality standards from an engineering perspective by doing code reviews, pair programming and knowledge sharing.

Im currently working as a Senior Software Engineer at Heady . Heady is a consultancy with offices in Brooklyn, NY and Mumbai and provides web and mobile application development services to customers in the US and Canada. Im currently working as a Senior Engineer and my role involves building scalable and well tested web apps, API's for mobile frontends and also doing code reviews with the team. Im also involved in the application deployment and delivery processes using the AWS cloud. My current tech stack is Node.js, Scala on the backend and React on the frontend. Im also using Docker as part of our application development process and CI/CD deployment pipeline and Kubernetes for container orchestration.

Haptik is one of the world’s largest Conversational AI companies, having reached over 100 million devices, and processed over 2 billion conversations to date. The company’s intelligent virtual assistant solutions enable Fortune 500 brands globally to enhance customer experience while saving costs and increasing sales. At Haptik my role involves scaling the architecture and performance of machine learning pipelines, working on the various microservices which are a part of the Haptik architecture and also working closely with ML engineers and Data Scientists in the team. I also work with DevOps for the deployment and delivery of our software on cloud platforms like AWS and Microsoft Azure.

Yalochat is an artificial intelligence and machine learning driven platform that enables large companies to provide seamless customer service using conversational AI on popular messaging channels like WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger. We currently operate in Latin America and Asia. Some of the large companies currently using Yalochat are Amazon, Walmart, AeroMexico, RBL Bank, Coca Cola and many more. I currently work as a Senior Software Engineer at Yalo and my work involves building microservices and api's to be consumed over conversational channels like Whatsapp and Facebook Messenger.

Worked as a senior full stack engineer at TWG, where my work involved building awesome web and mobile experiences for TWG customers using technologies like ReactJS, VueJS, RubyOnRails and Laravel. I was also involved in devops using AWS services and in mentoring junior engineers, doing code reviews and pair programming sessions with the team. I also did frequent knowledge sharing by doing lunch and learn sessions and talking about various topics related to software development, latest technology trends and best practices.

Worked as a contracting full stack engineer at an e-commerce startup called Dekeo.Dekeo is creating an online marketplace for customizable apparel and disrupting a highly fragmented $20B market. It is funded by the #1 US online reseller of blank imprintable clothing for teams, corporates, and promotional product markets. My responsibilities involve working on the backend & frontend features of the web application. The primary tech stack i worked on included: Ruby On Rails, Angular, AWS and Docker.

My responsibilities include building web applications using frameworks like Ruby On Rails and Node.js. I work on building and scaling the backend, deploying and managing the applications on cloud platforms like AWS, Google Cloud Platform, Heroku etc. and also do some frontend work in javascript and javascript frameworks like AngularJS etc. Apart from handson development i also do knowledge sharing with the team and write blog articles. Some of the projects i have been involved with are as follows:

1. A peer to peer communication and settlement platform for tollfree number providers using VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol)

This project was for one of the leading voice services and solutions provider in the US which offers products and services to the telecommunications industry - including retail, wholesale, inter-exchange and local-exchange carrier markets. The project consisted of building multiple independent services which had to work together in a distributed manner and were hosted in the Google Cloud Platform. Hence, we used a microservices based approach for building those services and they communicated asynchronously using message queues. StackDriver which is part of the Google Cloud Platform was used for health checks and monitoring of the different google compute instances used for hosting the services and we used the ELK (ElasticSearch, Logstash, Kibana) stack for logging purposes. We a built a web based dashboard using RubyOnRails which was used by the partners to manage their settlement and billing and also which was used by the admins to view and manage the data of different partners using the system, and also the data for the different services running.In addition to the dashboard i also worked on the following services:

a. An Autoscaler for google compute instances used for routing voice traffic

The voice traffic i.e. phone calls were routed over the internet using the Freeswitch server running on google compute instances. Since voice traffic is routed using the SIP protocol rather than the HTTP/HTTPS used for data, the out of the box autoscaler provided by Google Cloud Platform could not be used. I built the autoscaler for the voice traffic which did the job of launching new Freeswitch server instances, stopping and removing old ones based on the amount of call load on the network. It consisted of a load-balanced master program called the dispatcher built as a set of API's using RubyOnRails which communicated asynchronously using a message queue called RabbitMQ with a daemon program which i wrote in Ruby which ran on each machine instance and monitored things like the number of ongoing calls, cpu load etc. This daemon program was later ported to Golang for increased performance. The dispatcher also interfaced with the web based dashboard for showing in realtime the status of various google compute instances routing the phone calls.

b. Service for interfacing with the toll-free number data provider SMS/800 (Somos)

This service was used for automatically fetching toll free number data from a provider called SMS/800 now called Somos in the US and synchronizing it with the customers Postgres database. This data is sent in real time from SMS/800 servers over TCP/IP using a proprietary binary protocol,and the encryption and decryption algorithms used by the protocol were shared with us by them. We had to build a system to fetch this data, decrypt it and record the required information in a Postgres database, and also to send back the data we have in our db in encrypted format back to their servers for audit purposes. This system had to be scalable enough to handle the huge amount of real time data flowing through it. For building this i used the Twisted framework for Python which is very good for building software that needs to do network communication and ofcourse some basic knowledge of how tcp/ip works, the binary/hexadecimal data format and using a hex editor to analyze binary data came in handy. The python based service communicated with a service written in Ruby asynchronously using the ZeroMQ message queue for sending the decrypted data to be stored in the postgres database and also for receiving the data retrieved by the ruby service from the database to be encrypted and sent back to SMS/800 for audit purposes.

2. Online store for one of the leading E-Commerce and department store chain in the US

This consisted of building a system which consisted of API's in the backend built using RubyOnRails and a single page application (SPA) for the consumer facing website on the frontend which used those API's, built using Angular 2. I also worked on the admin facing dashboard which was built on Angular 1 which used the same Rails API backend. In addition to the backend Rails api's and the angularjs frontend ,i also worked on application deployment using the CI server Jenkins to EC2 instances in the AWS cloud. Used Docker in development to setup and orchestrate the different application and database services involved.

3. A web application for a food delivery startup

Worked on a web application, built using RubyOnRails which was used by the customers of a food delivery startup in the US to order food online and also the admin interface which was used by the admins to login and monitor the status of various orders being placed and coordinate with the delivery personnels.In addition to adding new features, writing tests and doing bug fixes, also worked on managing the application infrastructure on the AWS cloud. Circle CI was used as the CI server for deployment of new feature branches and running the test suite.

Worked as a senior software engineer at ReachLocal. My role involved building the Geomapping Tool.This application is used by ReachLocal for automating the mapping of their publisher data. The manual way of performing this task was extremely tedious and time consuming to ensure data integrity, and required strong MySQL knowledge and coordination between the product manager and DBA. This tool eliminated a large portion of manual mapping work, along with the need to involve DBA and other processes. It also allowed non-MySQL users to perform this task without having direct access to the database.This application was developed in three phases for three different target types, City, National and DMA (Designated Market Area).
My role involved building this web application using the RubyOnRails framework. I was also involved in automating the deployment of this application to the OpenStack cloud used by Reachlocal, using Capistrano. I also worked on creating the Puppet scripts which were used to automate the provisioning of servers where this application would get deployed. Vagrant was used during development to create a development environment in VirtualBox matching production using Puppet as a provisioner.

Worked as a software engineer at Infibeam working on developing web services using Ruby On Rails and also performing the role of a devops doing app deployment and server administration. My role involved building the backend API's powering Jive, a mobile music app built for Sony Music by Infibeam that allows people to stream or download music content to their mobile phones or tablets. The backend API's are built using the RubyOnRails framework and use MySQL as the database.

Worked as Software Development Engineer at Olacabs,a startup revolutionizing the way people in India travel. Its a service like Uber which allows users to book a cab wherever they are using a mobile app. I worked on developing scalable backend systems using Ruby on Rails,Sinatra,Cramp.in,MongoDB,Redis etc, and also on frontend development in Javascript & JQuery. Some of the the projects i worked on are as follows:

1. Cabs Dispatch System
This project is used for showing the physical location and various other details in real-time of the Olacabs cars in various cities. It can also be used to track in real-time the bookings being made across various cities and also to do auto-allotment of the nearest car based on the customers physical location.I was responsible for developing the backend system in a real-time asynchronous framework called Cramp.in, which is ruby based and similar to Node.js. MongoDB is used on the server-side for caching the data pulled from a MySQL database and Redis is used as a fast in-memory datastore for session-handling.The backend system uses server-sent-events (SSE) to send events in real-time to the client side which is developed using JQuery and the Google Maps API.

2. Inventory Management System (IMS)
IMS is a web-based dashboard used by Olacabs to track the inventory like Cars,Drivers,Contracts/Shifts etc.It can be used to manage and track all the data related to the various inventory of Olacabs.I was involved in working on different modules of IMS like Contracts and Duty Calendar using RubyOnRails, MySQL as the rdbms and the SugarCRM api.

3. SMS/Email Sender
This is a RESTful API that can be used to send multiple sms or email by sending JSON data over a POST request.I built this application using the Sinatra web application framework.The sms is sent using a bulk sms api and the emails are sent using postfix. Resque, a redis based background job processor is used as an asynchronous message queue. This application is used by various other systems at Olacabs which need to send out emails or sms.

Worked as a software developer working on the following open source technologies,Python,Django and
Scala. The following are the projects i worked on:

1. Cloud Queue Processors

This project involved building connect module plugins (cmp) for the following 3 call based media providers,Sensis,Recruit,CallSource and the 2 non-call based media providers, Jingle and WhitePages.A connect module plugin is used to fetch and process the customer data from a media provider using a scala based backend , a mongodb database for caching purposes, kestrel message queue for asynchronous message processing and a set of webservices written in python using the django web framework.
The entire cmp is hosted in a distributed manner in the amazon ec2 cloud and uses Amazon S3 for temporary storage and retreival of the media provider data. The processed data finally gets sent to WebVisibles database using the python and django based webservices. My role in the project involved writing scala code for the cmp’s. Writing unit tests for the code using the specs bdd (business driven development) framework for scala. Also writing the python webservices using django to interface with the cmp and WebVisibles MySQL database.

2. Cloud Web Services
Cloud Web Services are set of xml based RESTful web services written in scala and making use of jaxws,the java api for xml based restful web services and the servlet api and hosted in apache tomcat on the server.These web services are used by different webvisible products like Geneva, Reverse Proxy,Landing Page Creator etc. I worked on making changes to the Session and Event Logging webservices which were used by the products Reverse Proxy and the Landing Page Creator.

3. Scala Web Services
This project involved porting the python based webservices written using django to pure scala , by making use of the Scalatra web framework. SBT (Simple Build Tool) was used for build purposes.

Worked as a Java developer. The projects i worked on were, Association Management System and LMS
(Leave Card Management System).

1. Association Management System
This is an application built on the Force platform for the client Fantail Consulting and Technologies. Force platform is the development environment for building applications running in the cloud of Salesforce.com a SaaS company best known for its cloud based CRM software. This application allows interested parties to buy Association memberships and other stuff.
In this project i created the user interface for the app using Visualforce, the language used for developing UI on the Force platform and wrote the business logic using the Apex programming language, a Java like language for the Force platform.I was also involved in building the website which would be the front end for users to interact with using the Drupal CMS. Also,built the custom Drupal module in PHP for interfacing with the Force.com application running in the Salesforce cloud.

2. LMS (Leave Card Management System)

This is an inhouse project, which is used by Nucsoft employees to manage their leaves. Electronic Leave Management System is a solution developed for solving the problem of manually updating leave cards for employees leave records maintenance. This required a manual calculation & maintenance of the leave records. Hence they required a system that would automate the task of leave application, verification & maintenance of the same. This system was developed using JSP and Servlets for the backend, Oracle as the rdbms, and Javascript and JQuery for the frontend.

As an intern at Geodesic, i worked on a VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) product called Spokn (www.spokn.com). As part of the Spokn team i worked on Asterisk, which is an open source internet telephony toolkit which does the job of routing phone calls over the Internet using the SIP protocol.
I designed and developed the IVR (Interactive Voice Response) system which was used by Spokn customers.The technologies used were Perl and PHP for developing the backend AGI (Asterisk Gateway Interface) scripts for the IVR. I was also responsible for managing the servers running Asterisk and used Git for version control.

Worked on building applications for Nokia smartphones running the Symbian operating system in C++ and Python.