Sufian Rhazi


Oct 2024–Dec 2024: Independent Study at the Recurse Center

I took a sabbatical attending a 12 week batch at the Recurse Center—a retreat for programmers—where I worked on my own software. I spent time improving Gooey (my own frontend JavaScript framework designed around a dependency graph), prototyping a visual frontend development environment, and building a WebRTC peer-to-peer chat/file/media sharing browser application. It was a joy and a privilege to be able to spend this time working on my own software along with other people in such an open, collaborative, and friendly environment.

Oct 2022–Sep 2024: Staff Software Engineer at Datadog

As a staff engineer on Data Observability—a new business line—I was responsible for the creation and successful launch of two new products: Data Streams Monitoring and Data Jobs Monitoring, guiding both from proof-of-concept to general availability.

I met with customers to identify their needs; partnered with product, design, and marketing to align these needs with the capabilities of our data model; and led the technical direction to allow the team to rapidly iterate. By showing customers our progress early and often, we were able to win these partner customer accounts and grow this new business line rapidly (from nothing to >$1MM ARR).

Accomplishments

Jun 2018–Sep 2022: Staff Software Engineer at Slack

As a frontend staff engineer in product engineering, I was responsible for both the technical success of my team's product area as well as the broader success of the frontend organization, cultivating the practices, documentation, education, tooling, and development culture. I partnered with product and design to guide new feature development and to balance the demands of new features against existing maintenance needs.

Accomplishments

May 2017–Apr 2018: Senior Software Engineer II at Blink Health

As a senior engineer at Blink, I was responsible for laying the technical foundation of new product areas in a rapidly changing startup.

Accomplishments

Jun 2015–Apr 2017: Engineering Manager at Etsy

I managed two teams (Web Platform and Design Systems) with had total of 8 reports. I strove to provide an environment where all my reports had a clear aim, understood the team's goals, recognized their value to the team, and had enough mental space to learn and adapt. I hired 3 engineers, took 2 internal transfers, and promoted 2 engineers.

Accomplishments

Sep 2014–Jun 2015: Senior Software Engineer at Etsy

I led the Frontend Infrastructure team, responsible for the technical success of the supporting systems needed for building Etsy's web frontend.

Accomplishments

Jan 2010–Aug 2014: Senior Staff Engineer at IMVU

I proposed, advocated for, designed, led, and implemented projects and frameworks used broadly by the engineering organization.

Accomplishments

HTTP API framework. Designed and implemented an API framework standardizing authentication, authorization, input & output validation, and increased code reuse across the codebase.

Frontend JavaScript core library and UI framework Built a set of tools, core libraries, dependency injection framework, and test frameworks for application development targeting IE8+, FF, Chrome, (mobile) Safari, and node.js. The framework was designed to integrate well with our back-end "REST" framework and real-time messaging server for refreshing arbitrary resources as they were changed by other actors.

Sep 2006–May 2009: Software Engineer at Sendio, Inc.

As one of the 2-4 engineers during my time there, I was responsible for all aspects of the development and deployment of the front-end and back-end software for our anti-spam appliance. I was responsible for feature development, second-level support, and being on-call to diagnose and resolve customer issues.