Ishtiaque Zafar

{ converting ideas into products }

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About Me

Staff Software Engineer

Blogger

Dreamer, doer, go-getter

I enable businesses. I transform ideas into products using my coding superpowers. I am capable of building highly scalable solutions powered by the cloud! I am pro-serverless and pro-automation. If there's something that can be automated, I'll do it! I have worked at several startups from early stage phases and lead them to new heights. I am not your average "developer", I am extremely passionate about my work and love what I do. I also try be a part of the local developer community. I conduct training sessions, attend meetups and conferences and have spoken at a few myself.

Ishtiaque Zafar - Founding Engineer specializing in serverless and AWS
Work

I ♥ Software Engineering

I am currently working at Skyflow as a Founding Engineer since May 2024. At Skyflow, I'm building technology that enables on-site situational awareness for firefighters and first responders. Our drones are in the air in less than 1 minute from alert, providing critical real-time intelligence during emergencies. In our first 2 months, we achieved 24 missions with 435 minutes of flight time. What makes this even more remarkable is that I'm accomplishing this with a lean team of just 5 members, where I am the only engineer. I leverage automations and AI to the full potential - AI agents handle most of the small to medium features, allowing me to focus on the bigger challenges like architecture, security, and reliability. This is the future of software engineering: building more with less through intelligent automation.

Before Skyflow, I worked at FINN GmbH, a car-subscription startup based out of Munich, Germany, as a Staff Software Engineer from May 2020 to May 2024. At FINN, my main task was to analyze the existing processes in subscription management and car delivery, and to automate them. As FINN grew, I moved on to a specific sub-team in Operations department: the Customer Product team, to focus on building better services for our customers and achieved an industry leading Net Promoter Score (NPS) of 75! My Team and I also built a multi-country (EU and US) backend system to help us scale from 10,000 to 100,000 car subscriptions. Joining FINN as an early employee and building its technology from the ground up was an immense learning experience! We achieved remarkable milestones: reaching 4m ARR in the first year itself to 100m Subscription ARR in less than three years! We were awarded the Top 10 Statups in Germany (in 2022 and 2021) by LinkedIn!

I love working with TypeScript and AWS and my expertise lies in designing backend systems. I come from India. My professional life started out in 2015 and I have worked in various Indian startups before joining FINN in 2020. Beyond my day job, I'm a technology nerd at heart - I geek out about AI, homelab setups, and building automations for everything. If something can be automated, I'll find a way to do it!

For a complete and detailed work history, please refer to my LinkedIn page.

Ishtiaque Zafar at work - software engineering and automation

Got a great idea? Let's talk!

Message me on LinkedIn and I'll get back to you as soon as time allows me. I'm always open to collaborations and opportunities. We could even talk about tech or you can show me your cool weekend project.