Hi, I'm Kareem 👋

Senior Software Engineer · Notifications & Social Platforms

• Architected and led the rebuild of Wattpad's notification stack, replacing PHP monolith delivery with Go services (Kafka, gRPC/Protobuf) handling 1,700+ notifications/sec for 90M+ monthly active users, eliminating weekly incidents triggered by high-traffic story releases.
• Built the notification scheduling engine (EventBridge, Lambda, DynamoDB) that enabled campaign-based marketing notifications for the first time, driving a 30% increase in campaign-driven engagement.
• Led the consolidation of comments, reactions, and trust & safety logic from legacy PHP and Go services into a unified Go-based Social Platform, migrating live traffic with zero user-facing downtime.
• Migrated Social Feed infrastructure to Go services and implemented stateful feed bundling, cutting P99 latency by 84% and driving a 40% increase in feed engagement.
• Authored cross-platform technical designs for polls, comment sorting, and user badging, translating product requirements into per-platform responsibilities across backend, web, iOS, and Android, preventing behavior drift by aligning clients on a shared API contract.
• Contributed to advertising infrastructure processing 2K+ requests/second, directly supporting native and programmatic revenue streams across all platforms.
• Drove org-wide adoption of spec-first API development by using OpenAPI server code generation to streamline the Social Platform migration and securing leadership buy-in for a dedicated team and central spec repository.
• Shaped architectural direction and led technical mentoring for a team of 6, coaching intermediate engineers into project leadership; the team's track record earned it ownership of the Social domain as a second area of responsibility.
• Resolved production incidents on the on-call rotation, facilitated post-mortems, and shipped an internal MCP server exposing the service catalog and runbooks to AI agents and Slack, adopted by 15+ engineers.

Software Engineer III · Core Software Group

• Awarded the 2018 Cisco Pioneer Award for core contributions to pyATS (Python Automated Test Solutions), Cisco's flagship test framework used globally for network device automation and validation.
• Architected a Django web application that automated Cisco package distribution, reducing release processing time by 400% through automated validation, testing, and documentation generation.
• Led development of Xpresso, an internal CI platform delivering end-to-end test execution, testbed management, and analytics, transitioning architecture from monolithic Django to cloud-based microservices.
• Built a RESTful API gateway and real-time Kafka consumer services using Node.js and Express, enabling WebSocket-driven live updates and improved system scalability.
• Developed 10+ reusable Angular components and visualization tools that transformed YAML configurations into interactive network graphs, significantly improving developer experience.

Software Development Intern · Packet XC Development

• Developed automation tooling and test frameworks for SONET/SDH packet transport systems using test-driven development and automated regression testing, improving system reliability.
• Built log parsing and validation scripts that streamlined security analysis and debugging workflows for development teams.
• Collaborated with engineers to identify and triage critical software defects discovered through automated testing.