Riyad Yahya

Lead Software Engineer | Scalable Platforms & Product Growth
AI-augmented Senior Engineer and Fractional CTO, ten years in. Currently full-time at DataQueue with selected fractional engagements at Instack AI, Yalla Bites, and BidSource. Full-stack Next.js / NestJS with multi-cloud DevOps, accelerated by a stack of AI dev tools — Claude Code, Cursor, and custom subagents. Earlier: Software Lead at Coretava.
riyadyhia@gmail.com+970597216925linkedin.com/in/riyad-yahyagithub.com/riyadyahyariyadyahya.github.io

Experience

Senior Full-Stack & DevOps Engineer
DataQueue • July 2025 - Present (10 months)
  • Developing a conversation AI platform end-to-end using Next.js, NestJS, and MongoDB, delivering scalable AI-powered conversational experiences.
  • Owning DevOps on GCP GKE (Google Kubernetes Engine) — managing containerized deployments, cluster orchestration, networking, and cloud infrastructure for production scalability and reliability.
  • Building robust NestJS backend services backed by MongoDB, ensuring high performance and reliability for real-time AI interactions.
  • Creating responsive and intuitive Next.js frontend interfaces for seamless user engagement across web platforms.
  • Implementing and managing Stripe integration for payment processing and subscription management.
  • Developing WhatsApp integration for messaging and conversational AI interactions.
  • Building SIP integrations with LiveKit, Asterisk, and Vital PBX for telephony infrastructure and voice communication.
  • Implementing full-stack solutions combining NestJS APIs and Next.js frontend components for end-to-end feature delivery.
Fractional CTO
Instack AI • November 2025 - Present (5 months)
  • Leading a 4-engineer team building a multi-tenant SaaS voice agent platform that lets customers design complex voice workflows, connect Twilio phone numbers and calendars, and upload knowledge bases to handle inbound and outbound calls.
  • Architected the full-stack application on Next.js + Supabase deployed to Vercel, simplifying the prior stack to accelerate product iteration without sacrificing scalability.
  • Built and deployed LiveKit voice agents on AWS ECS for real-time, low-latency telephony at production scale.
  • Integrated Deepgram (speech-to-text), ElevenLabs (text-to-speech), and OpenAI for reasoning to deliver natural, low-latency conversational experiences.
  • Established GitHub Actions CI/CD pipelines and Sentry monitoring across environments, hardening release safety and observability for the early-stage platform.
  • Drove technical strategy, hiring guidance, and engineering practices — balancing rapid feature delivery with platform stability and long-term architecture decisions.
Backend & DevOps Engineer (Part-time)
Yalla Bites • November 2025 - Present (5 months)
  • Building backend services for a US-based home-chef marketplace that connects customers with local cooks and powers hyper-local, on-demand meal delivery.
  • Developing the platform on Next.js + Payload CMS + Supabase deployed to Vercel, powering both the consumer storefront and the operations tooling.
  • Integrated Stripe for end-to-end payments, payouts, and subscription flows across the marketplace.
  • Integrated Nash for delivery orchestration and Shippo for shipping label generation, streamlining fulfillment for both delivery and shipping use cases.
  • Owning DevOps with GitHub Actions CI/CD pipelines, Vercel-based deployments, and Sentry observability for fast, safe, and observable releases.
Full-Stack Engineer (Part-time)
BidSource • June 2025 - Present (10 months)
  • Building a logistics rate management and allocation platform that centralizes carrier rates, vendor capabilities, and pricing strategy for freight forwarders, eliminating fragmented spreadsheet-based pricing workflows.
  • Developing the full-stack application on Next.js + Supabase deployed to Vercel, owning features end-to-end from data model to UI.
  • Designed and shipped Opportunities — a workflow that lets forwarders combine multiple buy rates, generate batch carrier outreach emails, and create derived sell rates in a single flow, replacing multi-day manual quoting cycles.
  • Built carrier service area configuration, carrier and customer management, and accessorial configuration modules forming the operational backbone of the platform.
  • Built AWS Lambda functions for rate allocation logic and provisioned cloud infrastructure with Terraform for reproducible, version-controlled environments.
Lead Software Engineer
Coretava • March 2020 - July 2025 (5 years 3 months)
  • Led the design, development, and scaling of Coretava's loyalty platform, driving cross-functional execution and platform growth.
  • Restructured teams into specialized frontend/backend units, reducing cross-team blockers by 50% and increasing sprint velocity by 25%.
  • Championed technical excellence through mentorship and agile refinement.
  • Drove migration of 250K+ JavaScript lines to TypeScript, cutting runtime errors by 35% and accelerating feature delivery by 20%.
  • Restructured React frontend into a monorepo, enabling component modularization and publication of multiple loyalty widget flavors for diverse customers. Delivered JS SDKs to merchants, granting full frontend customizability.
  • Adopted NestJS for backend services, enabling 5x traffic growth while reducing module coupling by 60%.
  • Designed RabbitMQ messaging to decouple 10 microservices, supporting 3K+ concurrent users with 40% fewer AWS resources (P99 latency <200ms).
  • Migrated analytics to BigQuery, slashing main DB load by 70% and speeding complex queries 30x (15min → 30s).
  • Launched CoreLoyalty, adopted by 100+ merchants in 6 months, featuring a flexible point system (↓70% customization requests) and SMB-tailored cashback model (↑40% retention).
  • Developed 15+ API integrations (VTEX, Magento, WooCommerce), expanding addressable market by 60% and reducing merchant onboarding from 4 weeks → 3 days.
  • Designed public REST APIs and developer tools for third-party adoption. Collaborated with POS providers on real-time integrations, establishing Coretava as the region's most interoperable loyalty platform.
Senior Software Engineer
Coretava • October 2018 - March 2020 (1 year 4 months)
  • Architected end-to-end Shopify integration via custom apps, enabling seamless merchant onboarding (adopted by 30+ clients within 3 months, expanding TAM by 15%).
  • Led development of Android/iOS SDKs (complementing web SDKs), reducing client integration time by 40% and accelerating enterprise adoption.
  • Co-launched TeamUp – a team-based loyalty product – by building a React Native mobile app that drove a 30% engagement lift in pilot enterprise accounts.
  • Engineered AWS infrastructure (ECS/EC2/S3/CloudFront) supporting 500% YoY traffic growth with zero downtime during peak events.
  • Mentored junior engineers on React/Redux best practices and CI/CD standards, reducing production incidents by 50%.
Software Engineer
Coretava • January 2018 - October 2018 (8 months)
  • Designed and implemented the initial microservices backend (Node.js/ Express) deployed on AWS ECS. Established public API access via EC2 load balancers, creating a robust infrastructure for growth.
  • Developed key backend services powering user/tenant management, points lifecycle (earning/redemption), and interactive loyalty mechanics (missions, games, surveys).
  • Spearheaded development of the React/Redux admin dashboard, customer-facing Gamibot widget, and JavaScript SDK – critical tools for internal operations and client integration.
  • Managed frontend deployment pipeline using AWS S3 + CloudFront CDN, ensuring high-performance global access to the widget and dashboard.
  • Delivered a production-ready MVP that successfully onboarded multiple early customers, proving product value and technical scalability.
Software Engineer
Freightos • June 2016 - October 2018 (2 years 3 months)
  • Spearheaded frontend development (React.js, Redux) for the core team revamping Freightos' marketplace platform, now serving 100K+ monthly active users.
  • Architected a domain-driven frontend structure and integrated the company's internal UI kit.
  • Owned the end-to-end release pipeline: implemented comprehensive testing (Jest unit/snapshot, E2E) and established robust CI/CD workflows.
  • Championed seamless deployments using LaunchDarkly feature flags and Segment analytics for data-driven feature validation and performance monitoring.

Skills

Languages
TypeScript, JavaScript, Python, SQL, GraphQL, HTML, CSS
Frontend
Next.js, React, Redux, MobX, Tailwind CSS, Material UI, Bootstrap, Storybook, Server-side Rendering (SSR), Responsive Web Design
Backend
Node.js, NestJS, Express.js, Payload CMS, FastAPI, Flask, REST APIs, GraphQL APIs, WebSockets, Webhooks, Microservices, Event-driven Architecture
Databases & Storage
MongoDB, PostgreSQL, Supabase, BigQuery, Firebase, Amazon S3
DevOps & Cloud
GCP (GKE), AWS (ECS, EC2, EKS, Lambda, S3, CloudFront), Vercel, Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform, GitHub Actions, Jenkins, CI/CD Pipelines
AI & Voice
LiveKit, Deepgram, ElevenLabs, OpenAI, Whisper, Llama, Ollama, Vertex AI, AI Agents, Large Language Models (LLMs), Speech-to-Text, Text-to-Speech, Asterisk, Vital PBX, SIP
Integrations & APIs
Stripe (Connect, Checkout), Twilio, SendGrid, Nash, Shippo, WhatsApp, Auth0, Amazon Cognito, Shopify, VTEX, Magento, WooCommerce, Pub/Sub, Apollo
Testing & Tooling
Jest, Mocha, Sentry, Kibana, Google Analytics, Git, GitHub, Webpack, Figma
AI-Augmented Development
Claude Code, Cursor AI, Claude Agent SDK, Custom Subagents, MCP Servers, Agentic Workflows, AI-Assisted Code Review, Automated Codebase Exploration, Anthropic API, OpenAI API
Architecture & Leadership
Software Architecture, Solution Architecture, Technical Leadership, MERN Stack, Agile Software Development, Mentorship, Team Restructuring, Third-party Integration

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer System Engineering
September 2012 - June 2017
Birzeit University - Ramallah, Palestine