My History

I was born in the Bay Area and moved near Boulder, Colorado at a young age. I took an interest in web development in grade school, making fan sites on Tripod/Geocities for video games that I played, and ultimately built websites for family, friends, and school groups. At university, I graduated magna cum laude in Economics with a quantitative emphasis, and volunteered in various capacities for a student-run organization helping the community with mental health resources.

As I wrapped up an internship with a financial services company, I pitched them a concept for a new website – to which they happily accepted. Realizing that I really enjoy web development and that I could get paid for it, I decided to turn it into my career and join a local company that built white-label mobile and web experiences for other media and financial companies (e.g. sites like ETrade, Charles Schwab, NYTimes). There were a lot of fun client projects here that I got to cut my teeth on — one of the memorable ones included converting a Flash-based stock chart on the NYTimes to HTML/JS, so that it could work on iPad.

After three years, I was offered a position at LinkedIn and moved to Silicon Valley. I worked there for almost three years on UI Infrastructure, LinkedIn Sales Solutions, and the Growth team (specifically on People You May Know page & the Address Book Import flow).

In 2016, I moved to New York City to help kickstart the Video team and bring more front-end engineers to NY. I transitioned to Engineering Management as I realized a need for a front-end focused voice in the room, while also enjoying coaching, advocating for, and helping other engineers grow to new heights.

The team grew from 5 web engineers to 12 cross-functional engineers (web, backend, mobile) and we worked on a plethora of projects – such as media creation libraries that could be used by any product team, an open source light video transcoder, and a ton of data ingestion pipelines to track the performance of our bespoke video and image solutions.

I also joined NYC’s Tech-In-Residence program and taught a front-end focused project course for College of Staten Island students at the LinkedIn New York office in the Empire State Building. Finding ways to give back to th community is important to me, and I’m grateful for the experience with the NYC Tech Talent Pipeline!

After nearly 8 years at LinkedIn, I decided it was time for change and joined Twitter in 2021 where I started managing a team of 8 cross-functional engineers working on Profile. The highest visibility launch for our team was “Automated Account” labels, which allow accounts to mark themselves as bots and tie them to another account or entity (example). For the last couple of months there, I managed the Birdwatch (now “Community Notes”) engineering team, and helped the Accessibility team. The team at Twitter 1.0 was super passionate about the mission, and I’m thankful for working with such a wonderful, motivated, and stellar team.

Once the Elon/Twitter situation came to fruition, I moved to Algolia leading the Developer Experience engineering team which worked on the CLI, Code Exchange, the documentation platform, and DocSearch. While the team was nimble (5 engineers), I’m proud of how the team scaled their efforts and took ownership while maintaining a reasonable work/life balance (super important to me).

Culturally, my family is Persian. “Kabob enthusiast” is usually my go-to bio when I’m signing up on social sites for the first time…since, well, I really like kabob. (More about that here)

My wife and I welcomed our daughter into the world in 2020, and our son in 2023. Once in a blue moon, you might see one of them make a guest appearance on video call. We now live on Long Island in an area that’s about a 50-minute train ride from Manhattan.