Mohammed Ashfaq

Platform & Site Reliability Engineer at Mentimeter · Stockholm

I build things that monitor your application

I work across observability, infrastructure, incident response, and security operations, making production easier for engineers to run and problems faster to spot. What goes out should be performant, secure, and monitored.

See my work Get in touch
Years building
8
Awards
TIME Person of the Year, 2006

Work

Eight years of making systems behave

  1. Platform & Site Reliability Engineer

    Mentimeter · Stockholm · Jun 2022 – now

    Keeping an interactive presentation platform healthy for a live audience, where a slow response is as visible as an outage.

    • Led the migration of production workloads from Heroku to AWS ECS, improving application performance by 20% and reducing hosting costs by ~10%, while giving engineers a platform they could experiment on freely.
    • Built and operated a multi-account AWS structure with centralised identity through IAM Identity Center, giving teams isolated environments with consistent access controls and guardrails.
    • Worked with product engineers to establish a common OpenTelemetry tracing architecture across products and teams, giving consistent request visibility from frontend through backend services.
    • Reduced on-call toil by auditing 90 days of Datadog monitors, then building Cursor-based agents that assess incoming alarms and attribute ownership, cutting manual triage effort by ~50%.
    • Migrated the majority of infrastructure to Infrastructure-as-Code (CDKTF/Terraform), replacing manual console changes with reviewed, version-controlled deployments.

    AWSDatadogTerraformOpenTelemetryOIDC / IAMSLOs

  2. DevOps Engineer

    NOMADD Desert Solar Solutions · Saudi Arabia · Aug 2020 – Jun 2022

    Robotic, waterless cleaning for desert solar farms, with fleets of machines reporting in from the sand.

    • Rewrote Node.js and C++ messaging paths, taking communication latency from 2 s to 50 ms.
    • Built automated Azure DevOps CI/CD pipelines that removed 80% of manual deployment work.
    • Tuned and monitored AWS EC2, S3, Lambda, and RDS, cutting spend by roughly $1,500 a month.

    Node.jsC++Azure DevOpsAWSDocker

  3. Software Engineer

    King Abdullah University of Science and Technology · Aug 2018 – Jul 2020

    • Re-engineered end-to-end service processes and cut paperwork by 90% across five departments.
    • Built a Power Apps and SharePoint handover panel that cut time spent locating lost items by 75%.
    • Automated unit and UI testing for .NET business applications, reducing regressions reaching users.

    .NETPower AppsSharePointAutomated testing

Projects

Things I've shipped

Newest first. The older ones are no longer live, kept here because the work still counts.

In review

What Do I Cook Today

iOS app that picks tonight's dinner from the dishes you already cook, weighted by how long since you last made each one. Offline by design.

Try the picker → Source

2018

AlNifayat

Waste-management app for the KAUST community: collection schedules, what-goes-where guidance, and resale. I led design, development, and a small team through to release on the App Store.

No longer on the App Store

2019 · SAP Hackathon winner

Attendo

Android app that replaces paper roll-calls, built in three days as team lead of the winning entry at the KAUST SAP Hackathon. Projected to cut paper use by 70% and manual attendance by 40%.

Project page

2019

BuildUrCv

Resume builder with modern templates. Took it from concept to deployment, with automated builds and continuous integration.

Site retired

Background

Toolkit and schooling

What I reach for

Reliability & observability

DatadogGrafanaSentryCloudWatchOpenTelemetryIncident response

Cloud & infrastructure

AWSOrganizationsIAMECSLambdaRDSTerraformDocker

Languages

PythonBashTypeScriptNode.jsGoC++C#

CI/CD & security

GitHub ActionsJenkinsAzure DevOpsOIDC / IAMBug bounty triage

Education

M.S. Computer Science

Northeastern Illinois University, Chicago · Aug 2019 – Aug 2021

  • Graduated with a 4.0 GPA.

B.S. Computer Science Engineering

Osmania University, Hyderabad · May 2014 – Jun 2018

  • Graduated with distinction and a 3.78 GPA.

Contact

Say hello

Email is the shortest path, and it reaches me directly. I read everything, and I reply to anything that isn't a pitch deck.

hello@mohammedashfaq.com GitHub LinkedIn