Farzin Shifat

farzinshifat@gmail.com · GitHub · LinkedIn · farzinbuilds.com

Summary

Founding Engineer and CTO at a stealth startup, building AI-powered education products for India. Hands-on architect and engineer across backend, infrastructure, and applied AI, personally designing systems, writing code, and shipping product end to end. M.S. in Computer Science, AI & Machine Learning.

Technical Skills

Languages and Data: TypeScript, Node.js, Python, SQL, PostgreSQL, Supabase (RLS), Redis

Backend: REST API design, NestJS, auth (JWT, OAuth, MFA, RLS), Stripe Connect, webhook idempotency, CI/CD (GitHub Actions), Docker, Nginx, observability

Testing: Playwright, Vitest, integration and accessibility testing, Spec-Driven Development

Frontend: Next.js, React, TypeScript

AI: Retrieval-augmented generation, OpenAI embeddings, vector retrieval

Cloud: AWS (EC2, S3, Lambda), Vercel, Cloudflare

Experience

Founding Engineer and CTO

Stealth Startup, New York, NY (Remote) | Jul 2026 to Present

• Co-founder and founding engineer: personally designing the system architecture, writing the code, and shipping the product end to end.
• Building an AI study companion for Class 6-12 students: curriculum-grounded answers with step-by-step guidance powered by RAG over curriculum content.
• Building an AI school-operations platform with live attendance, fee tracking, staff status, smart alerts, and conflict-free timetabling.
• Own backend architecture, data model, infrastructure, and delivery across the product surface.

Founding Engineer and Solo Architect (Contract)

StrictlySurf LLC, New York, NY (Remote) | Jan 2026 to Present

• Sole engineer for a production surf marketplace shipped in four months: 301 API routes, 231 Postgres migrations, 754 React components, and 339 automated tests.
• Built enterprise-grade auth: separate customer and admin sessions, MFA, step-up re-authentication, hierarchical authority policy, and full audit logging.
• Enforced per-vendor data isolation with Supabase row-level security across 231 migrations.
• Integrated Stripe Connect payouts and Shippo with idempotent, HMAC-verified webhooks and integer-cent money handling.
• Authored 339 automated tests (integration, Playwright E2E, accessibility, security, static analysis) gated in a GitHub Actions CI/CD pipeline.
• Ran 22 production cron jobs: marketplace lifecycle, dispute auto-resolution, shipping and tax reconciliation, surf-data refresh.
• Shipped a production RAG surf-report chatbot grounded in live swell data via OpenAI embeddings and request-time vector retrieval.

Computer Science and Mathematics Teacher

Cardinal Spellman High School, Bronx, NY | Sep 2026 to Present

• Teaching computer science and mathematics; building classroom systems and tooling that turn grading, attendance, and assessment data into actionable insight.

CTO / Lead Software Engineer

Sports Excitement, New York, NY (Remote) | Jan 2025 to Sep 2026

• Led engineering for a founding-stage sports platform: system architecture, engineering standards, and delivery across web and mobile.
• Architected and owned the production NestJS backend (auth, payments, core product) shared by web and mobile under one service contract.
• Designed and operated hybrid VPS and AWS infrastructure: containerized services, CI/CD, centralized logging and observability.
• Hardened the security posture: Cloudflare-tunnel-only default-deny ingress, Zero Trust SSO, JWT and OAuth with row-level security.
• Shipped the public marketing site solo, then folded it into the product backend.
• Owned cross-repo engineering execution, the engineering hiring bar, and code-review standards.

Education and Certifications

• M.S. in Computer Science AI & Machine Learning, Western Governors University, May 2026
• B.S. in Computer Science, Western Governors University, 2025
• AWS Machine Learning Associate, 2026
• AI Optimization Developer Certificate, WGU (2025); IBM AI Developer Professional, IBM (2024); Backend Developer, Boot.dev (2024)