Work Experience

Hey. My name’s Ahmed, and this is my technology portfolio. I work primarily in architecture, development, and consultation of Financial Technology Grade Servers and Databases, Video Games, Digitized Board Games, Desktop Applications, Flight Simulations, and Hardware Integrations. My academic contributions include a few speeches at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, teaching at the Harvard Game Academy, and a chapter in a game technology textbook. My technical specialties are C#, .NET, AWS Infrastructure, FinTech, Flight Simulation Systems, CI/CD Pipelines, Webservers, and Unity Engine. I’m also experienced in C/C++, Elixir, JavaScript, Java, Node, UI engineering, and Unreal Engine.

I am currently the Principal Software Engineer of the Product Engineering organization at Guaranteed Rate. At this position, I take ownership of development and architecture of many enterprise-wide apps and microservices. On a given day, I am:

  • Writing multitenant, enterprise-scoped applications with configurable vendor integrations, with or
    without support of a team
  • Directing organizational architecture for new applications and services within the Product Engineering
    organization geared towards reducing enterprise-wide complexity and cost
  • Established the enterprise architecture “RFC” (Request for comments) system that allowed enterprise
    standards to be discussed and reviewed by all engineers in the enterprise before adoption
  • Managing technical interactions between external vendors, development teams, and stakeholders

For the 3 years prior, I worked at Quicken Loans, architecting and developing Rocket Professional from pre-production all the way to live maintenance. Rocket Professional is a first-to-market mortgage origination platform that allows a mortgage origination company to partner with entities who don’t usually originate loans, but are highly exposed to the process (e.g. realtors) and turn them into third-party originators. For those in FinTech, that probably sounds awesome. To those who aren’t as familiar, these videos explain the gains in detail:

As one of the founding engineers of the Rocket Professional team, I worked with numerous teams and external vendors in many capacities to get Rocket Pro stood up and first-to-market. The following is a short list of major accomplishments during that time.

  • First to draw out the full architecture diagram of the Rocket Pro services, which exposed numerous issues and led to a streamlining of our systems across the board.
  • Integrated legacy systems into Rocket Pro and vice versa.
  • Served as Tech Lead for early projects that laid the foundation for easy future additions.
  • Rewrote entire applications from external vendors to the internal tech stack.
  • Ideated, specced, wrote, tested, deployed, and integrated reusable libraries into downstream systems. Mentored senior engineers in their use and modification.
  • Prototyped, refined, and finalized the CI/CD pipeline and server integrations for Rocket Professional.
  • Provided extensive code review feedback and mentoring during the entire development process.
  • Maintained extensive documentation for anything complicated that I touched, including but not limited to IDE setup processes for legacy systems, deployments, and major code updates.
  • Maintained an exceptionally high standard of communicating complex engineering information and processing it into easy-to-understand and non-intimidating bites for non technical team members.
  • Maintaining the Rocket Professional production environment by resolving on-call engineering issues.

Prior to Quicken Loans, I worked on mobile, web, and eCommerce apps at Clear Launch as a Solution Architect. My work there lined up with the freelancing work I was already doing prior to meeting them, just on a larger scale and with a team. I mainly specced out applications for engineers to write, talked with clients and gathered requirements, and researched the most experimental parts of our applications and prototyped them to show to the client. It was a good time and a great team. Feel free to check out their website, or head to my resume for a detailed description of some of that work.

Here’s a video of one of the longer tech projects I programmed on from 2015-2017, an integrated flight simulator interface:

My main responsibility was architecting and writing all of the backend software for the Navigator application suite– a collection of software that allows customers to control and set up the simulation’s parameters and hardware functions, and serves as the interface for the flagship product of Redbird Flight Simulations. Myself and Kurt Williams, an amazing programmer and my boss at the time, wrote and architected the full suite of software ourselves. The other applications I architechted and wrote there are as follows:

    • Satloc/AgNav Crop Duster Light Bars (C#, C++/C, .NET, GDI+) –Emulates a physical LED-based lightbar on a crop duster aircraft by implementing lightbar display driver code as a .NET app.
    • Qualification Test Guide (Elixir, Phoenix, C#, .NET, PostgreSQL, SimConnect)–Data-driven flight simulator certification application. Runs flight simulator systems through automated maneuvers, then graphs and prints out flight model and motion platform data to EASA standards.
    • Guided Independent Flight TrainingService(C#, .NET, SimConnect) –Back end Windows-based service for grading missions. This app implements a fully custom, designer drivenscripting language.
    • Sidekick(Java, Python, BLE, Phidgets)–Flight recorder for small aircraft in flight schools.

And here’s a video of some of the interactive marketing projects I programmed and maintained over 2013-2015:

    Before Redbird Flight, I worked at an exhibit company named EWI Worldwide. There I got the chance to make a lot of cool, interactive software that went into museums, leasing offices, stores, and other public places for people to enjoy.

    I’m also a Small Business Owner with a degree in business from the State Farm College of Business at Illinois State University. The hands on experience in business, combined with my 10+ years of experience in architecture and engineering, has allowed me to develop very highly targeted technology solutions that engineers without business experience could not create without assistance.

    In the past, I’ve worked in the entertainment games industry on Star Wars: The Old Republic and Kingdoms of Amalur. I have a long history of integrating games into nontraditional solutions as well. For reference, here are my past game projects:

    Thanks for visiting. Have a look around, and feel free to contact me or find me on LinkedInLinkedIn