Riyad Yahya
Fractional CTO & Senior Engineer
Fractional CTO and hands-on senior engineer, ten years in. I partner with multiple companies to own architecture and lead engineering while building alongside the team. I ship AI and voice products, and platforms on Next.js / NestJS with multi-cloud DevOps, using AI dev tools like Claude Code, Cursor, and custom subagents. Most recently I led full-stack and DevOps at DataQueue; before that, Lead Software Engineer at Coretava for ~5 years.
Experience
Fractional CTO & Senior Engineer
Independent Consulting · – Present
- Partner with multiple companies as a fractional CTO and hands-on senior engineer, shipping full-stack product and platform work across Next.js, Supabase, NestJS, Node.js, and Python.
- Advise on software architecture, multi-cloud DevOps (Vercel, AWS, GCP), and scalable backend design for early- and growth-stage teams.
- Embed AI-native delivery to speed up teams and raise code quality: vibe coding for fast prototypes, and agentic coding with Claude Code, Cursor, and custom subagents for production.
- Build AI, voice, and conversational features end-to-end, from LLM orchestration to real-time telephony and messaging integrations.
Selected clients
Instack AI (24x7 Direct Pty Ltd), Senior Solution Architect & Engineer
- Leading a 4-engineer team building a multi-tenant SaaS voice agent platform: customers design voice workflows, connect Twilio numbers and calendars, and upload knowledge bases to handle inbound and outbound calls.
- Cut the voice agent’s response latency roughly 3x, from 2 or 3 seconds to about 1 second, so conversations feel real-time.
- Built and deployed LiveKit voice agents on AWS ECS, with Deepgram speech-to-text, ElevenLabs text-to-speech and OpenAI for reasoning.
- Integrated Twilio telephony from the ground up, including regulated-number provisioning, regulatory bundles and toll-free support, plus per-number Stripe billing with failure rollbacks.
- Built the structured call-data capture and workflow-variable engine, turning static call flows into data-aware ones.
BidSource, Senior Solution Architect
- Building a rate management platform for freight forwarders on Next.js, with Supabase (Postgres, Auth, Storage) as the entire backend, replacing spreadsheet-based pricing workflows.
- Designed and shipped Opportunities, which combines multiple buy rates, batch carrier outreach and derived sell rates in one flow, replacing multi-day manual quoting cycles.
- Built a 4-tier lane pricing recommendation engine with AI estimation and confidence scoring, plus projected-margin calculations.
- Built AWS Lambda functions for rate allocation, provisioned infrastructure with Terraform, and added fuel-surcharge management through the EIA API.
Yalla Bites, Backend & DevOps Engineer
- Building backend services for a US home-chef marketplace that connects customers with local cooks for on-demand meal delivery.
- Developing on Next.js, Payload CMS and Supabase on Vercel, with Stripe payments, payouts and subscriptions.
- Integrated Nash for delivery orchestration and Shippo for shipping labels, and own CI/CD with GitHub Actions and Sentry monitoring.
Senior Full-Stack & DevOps Engineer
DataQueue · – (11 months)
- Built a conversational AI platform end-to-end using Next.js, NestJS, and MongoDB, delivering scalable AI-powered conversational experiences.
- Owned DevOps on GCP GKE (Google Kubernetes Engine), managing containerized deployments, cluster orchestration, networking, and cloud infrastructure for production scalability and reliability.
- Built robust NestJS backend services backed by MongoDB, ensuring high performance and reliability for real-time AI interactions.
- Created responsive and intuitive Next.js frontend interfaces for seamless user engagement across web platforms.
- Implemented and managed Stripe integration for payment processing and subscription management.
- Developed WhatsApp integration for messaging and conversational AI interactions.
- Built SIP integrations with LiveKit, Asterisk, and Vital PBX for telephony infrastructure and voice communication.
- Implemented full-stack solutions combining NestJS APIs and Next.js frontend components for end-to-end feature delivery.
Lead Software Engineer
Coretava · – (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 · – (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 · – (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 · – (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, TanStack Query, Redux, MobX, Tailwind CSS, Material UI, Bootstrap, Storybook, Server-side Rendering (SSR), Responsive Web Design
- Backend
- Node.js, NestJS, Express.js, Python (FastAPI, Flask), Payload CMS, REST APIs, GraphQL APIs, WebSockets, Webhooks, RabbitMQ, Amazon SQS, Microservices, Event-driven Architecture
- Databases & Storage
- PostgreSQL, Supabase (Postgres, Auth, Storage), MongoDB, Redis, BigQuery (analytics, ML), Firebase, Amazon S3
- DevOps & Cloud
- Vercel, GCP (GKE), AWS (ECS, EC2, EKS, Lambda, S3, CloudFront), Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform, GitHub Actions, Jenkins, CI/CD Pipelines
- AI & Voice
- LiveKit, Twilio Voice, Deepgram, ElevenLabs, OpenAI, Whisper, Llama, Ollama, Vertex AI, AI Agents, AI Agent Orchestration, Agentic AI Systems, RAG (knowledge bases), Large Language Models (LLMs), Speech-to-Text, Text-to-Speech, Asterisk, Vital PBX, SIP
- Integrations & APIs
- Stripe (Connect, Checkout, Billing), Twilio, WhatsApp Business API, Gmail API, SendGrid, Nash, Shippo, 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
- Vibe Coding, Agentic Coding, Claude Code, Cursor AI, Replit, Claude Agent SDK, Custom Subagents, MCP Servers, Prompt Engineering, Context Engineering, Spec-driven Development, Agentic Workflows, AI-Assisted Code Review, Automated Codebase Exploration, Anthropic API, OpenAI API, Gemini 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
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Birzeit University - Ramallah, Palestine