About me
Hi there! I am a Pakistani-Canadian Software Engineer living in the Greater Seattle Area along with my wife and 2 boys. When I am not working, I love playing and tumbling around with my kids, watching TV with my wife, and playing boardgames with my friends. I got into computers with video games and building PCs. I sometimes still spin up my favorite classics like Quest for Glory, Celtic Eye of the Balor, Shadowrun, Monkey Island, Baldurs Gate, Age of Empires 2 etc. I also enjoy reading high fantasy, and am a big fan of author David Eddings and rate his fantasy series The Tamuli higher than LOTR (grab the pitchforks!).
Experience
- 10+ years building Cloud Infrastructure and critical Tier-0 Distributed systems at Amazon, AWS and Stripe.
- 5+ years Management and Leadership experience and passionate about coaching and developing other leaders.
- Deeply technical and hands on with system design, operations, monitoring and incident response management.
Engineering Manager – Stripe
Financial Data Ingestion. December 2020 to current
I am leading a new initiative to build Data Ingestion for the Financial Ledger at Stripe. We are building for the next generation internet economy, and solving complex problems to track all of Stripes money movement while ensuring data correctness, durability and compliance at scale. I am hiring Senior/Staff/Principal Engineers in North America to lead this effort, please contact me for details.
Software Development Manager – AWS
Identity – Tags. July 2015 – November 2020
Led the Tags platform at AWS, which are used for resource organization, access control and fine grained billing. I owned several critical and foundational services offering 4 9’s availability and millisecond latencies, serving tens of millions of tags/second worldwide.
- Responsible for overall Charter including Vision, Goals, Roadmap, Strategy and Execution for Tagging at AWS
- Influenced across AWS to adopt Tags as a new AWS Public Service Launch Requirement.
- Increased adoption of Tags from 15% (2016) to 95% (2020) of AWS Services. 180 AWS Services support Tags today.
- Drove a Consistent Customer experience with standardized tooling, libraries, test suites and auditing mechanisms.
- Improved the speed of onboarding to the Tags platform from 20 weeks to 4 weeks of effort for teams.
- Launched Tag Policies at AWS re:Invent 2019, enabling enterprises to develop a centralized tagging standard.
- Eliminated operational pain by reducing High severity tickets from 30 to less than 5 per week by investing in a culture of operational excellence, root cause analysis, point and click tooling, and proactive ticket triage.
- Reduced outages by 50% YoY from 2017 to 2020 by encouraging a culture of continuous delivery, feature parity in all regions, automated region builds, automatic rollback based on alarms, staged rollouts, OneBoxes, Canaries etc.
- Spearheaded cost reduction of 5M$ in 2019 by simplifying architecture, deprecating legacy services, migrating to cost efficient hardware and releasing idle hardware.
Senior Software Development Engineer – AWS
Platform – Tags . January 2013 – June 2015
- Team lead for AWS Tags and overseeing the development and architecture of core services for the platform
- Delivered a Tier-0 Service to store and serve Tags/Meta-Data for Resources on behalf of all AWS Services. The service is on the critical call path for AWS resource creation, retrieval and authentication. I also created a tag data Replication mechanism which received a Patent for ensuring consistency of data between two distributed systems.
- Built a Discovery Service, enabling customers to organize their resources via Tags. Received a patent for building a Global query capability that fetches tags from any region where the calling user had resources.
Software Development Engineer – AWS
EC2 & Kinesis. October 2011 – December 2012
Built a benchmarking suite to measure performance and identify bottlenecks in the AWS EC2 network. Also helped launch Kinesis and delivered the AWS Console experience.
Software Development Engineer – Amazon.com
Various. September 2008 – October 2010
- Built the “Buy a Physical magazine and Get discounted Kindle subscription” feature.
- Launched a new Customer Support Portal for Kindle for the second gen launch.
- Redesigned Amazon’s Host Monitoring service and eliminated bottlenecks.