Jabran Rafique

Staff Engineer (Jan 2023 — Present)

Rated People

As a Staff Engineer, I inherited a majority of responsibilities from my previous Tech Lead role and expand to encompass broader responsibilities, including leadership, strategic planning, and technical excellence.

• Provide technical leadership and strategic guidance in Frontend development to align with the business long-term goals and initiatives
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams, including product, design, and other engineering teams, to drive technical decisions and project scoping
• Mentor and guide other engineers, including Frontend developers and possibly engineers from other disciplines, to enhance their skills and promote a culture of learning and growth
• Take ownership of architectural decisions and technology choices, ensuring they align with best practices, scalability, and maintainability
• Lead the migration and adoption of modern Frontend technologies and frameworks, keeping the company's tech stack up-to-date and in line with industry trends
• Collaborate with engineering managers and cross-functional leaders to define and execute the Frontend team's technical roadmap
• Oversee the development of complex and critical Frontend features, and code reviews to ensure the delivery with high quality, performance, and scalability

Frontend Tech Lead (Jun 2018 — Dec 2022)

Rated People

As a Frontend Tech Lead, I was adept at mentoring and managing teams, driving modernization efforts, and ensuring code quality and platform health.

• Mentor and manage a team of Frontend developers, maintain regular team powwows, 1:1s and bi-annual performance reviews
• Discuss & challenge technical aspects to help with project scoping and architectural decisions with product/tech/design teams
• Knowledge sharing with peer programming and extensive code reviews to ensure best practices
• Help retire legacy PHP stack by moving to modern tech, primarily ReactJS, NodeJS, Remix, Cloudflare and AWS. Maintain an ongoing performance improvement roadmap
• Write robust, performant, and scalable code, unit and UI tests in a variety of languages, frameworks and tools, such as HTML, CSS, JavaScript, ReactJS, NodeJS, Ruby, Bash, Docker, WordPress, Elastic, Remix, Tailwind CSS, cloud and more
• Monitoring platform health using SaaS tools such as AppDynamics and Heap
• Assist product and CRM teams with user testing and AB testing using tools such as Cloudflare Workers, VWO and SEOClarity
• Identify and address technical debt, ensuring the Frontend codebase remains maintainable and scalable over time
• Participate in recruitment efforts, including interviewing and evaluating Frontend engineering candidates, to build a high-performing engineering team

Frontend Web Developer (Nov 2015 — May 2018)

Rated People

Involved in planning and development of new features and maintaining the existing codebases by keeping up with best practices, performance, security and industry standards.

• Involved with Frontend stack migration to the cloud (AWS)
• Involved with platform key rebrand in 2016
• Involved with optimising existing PHP Symfony micro-apps to be performant and cloud-ready
• Helped with upgrading the tools chain used in the Frontend eco-system and modernised the stack by replacing the obsolete technologies
• Involved in developing a new Symfony app to fully automate the customer signups flow, including fraud and risk assessment, and validations externally and internal APIs to reduce overhead for sales and fraud teams
• Accustomed with NodeJS, ReactJS and many other relevant modern tools to develop a REST API layer to support future client-side apps with robust authentication flow

Lead Web Developer (May 2013 — Oct 2015)

Influence Digital

Oversee the social apps and websites development for clients, mentor and manage the development team and maintain technical roadmap.

• Manage development cycles, timelines, roadmaps, quality of code and documentation for apps and websites
• Monitor and maintain best practices. Provide guidance and examples to adopt the latest technology trends to improve the development workflow
• Mentor junior developers and freelancers. Provide consultation and analysis to design lead, report and collaborate with the project manager to maintain development flow sprints
• Maintain in-house developed social media application development frameworks
• Build prototypes based on ideas for social campaigns
• Develop and maintain LAM(PHP) stack-based MVC framework and boilerplates for in-house custom web apps development
• Clients included Thomas Cook Group, Hotels4U, Marco Aldany UK, RedStripe, Arcadia Group, Intec Digital, Modestep, Nordic Games, Hobbs, ShopStyle, Outfit Fashion, WeAreFSTVL, Rise Festival, OnBlackHeath, Pathé

Social Web Developer (Feb 2013 — Apr 2013)

Influence Digital ex. United Agency

Developing social web apps for the Facebook platform and integrating third-party APIs (Facebook, Google Maps, Instagram) to build interactive apps engaging a vast social media audience.

• Involved with the development of standalone web apps for social media and websites in a small team
• Enhanced the development workflow from a basic structure to a more stable, secure and reusable structure by introducing and encouraging the use of the latest technologies, best practices and workflows
• Developing social web apps for the Facebook platform
• Integrating third-party APIs (Facebook, Google Maps, Instagram) to build interactive apps engaging a vast social media audience
• Involved with the infra team to restructure the servers’ setup and development workflow for better management
• Clients included mostly from retail, travel and music i.e. Arcadia Group, Thomas Cook, WeAreFSTVL and Lisa Stansfield

Childcare Vouchers

A directory of businesses accepting childcare vouchers as a method of payment.

Covidonation

A directory of different organisations, charities and individuals who are working around the world to help the vulnerable during the pandemic of Coronavirus (COVID-19).

Covid19 Today

Daily updated figures for COVID19 for every country and continent

Reason to Follow

A browser extension that helps you remember the reason to follow an account on social platforms.

Work Clock

A MacOS menu bar utility app I developed to help myself while working remotely from different timezones. The app is written in Swift.

Google Maps API React Hook

A custom React hook to integrate Google Maps JavaScript SDK in React apps.

Facebook API React Hook

A custom React hook to integrate Facebook JavaScript SDK in React apps.

Postcode.io PHP SDK

PostcodesIO is a PHP library for postcodes.io API. It provides support to most recent versions of PHP and has robust unit testing suite to report any changes in base API or otherwise.

Guess Where

A geo quiz app built with HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and Google Maps API. It is inspired from an image-based quiz by The Independent.

Socialmedia.js

A JavaScript library that simplifies the social media integration into the web apps. It has a comprehensive documentation covering setup and usage for various supportive social media platforms.

Fetchwitter

An easy-to-use PHP client to authenticate and consume Twitter API in web apps. Fetchwitter exposes a small and simple API to fetch Tweets and perform searches with terms such as a hashtag. It also has a WordPress plugin for easy integration into WordPress.

CSV Parser

A PHP client to parse CSV data from a file, stream, or string and convert into indexed or associative array format.

JS Memcache

A lightweight JavaScript in-memory cache to store data for better performance by saving on network requests.