Zakaria Sharief

Responsibilities

• Established new AI development processes and standards for the R&D organization, defining how agentic systems are designed, built, tested and shipped to production.
• Built MCP (Model Context Protocol) tool servers exposing booking, reservation, checkout, reviews and availability APIs for consumption by internal AI agents. · Mar 2026 – Jul 2026
• Architected a new Kubernetes control plane integrating AI agents through an Agent Gateway with MCP-backed access to internal APIs. · Mar 2026 – Jul 2026
• Designed and delivered a new group booking application built on multi-agent orchestration. · Mar 2026 – Jul 2026
  • Availability agent – checks unit availability across date ranges using MCP tools.
  • Booking/Reservation agent – books reservations across franchise and Vacasa units.
  • Consensus/Voting agent – coordinates group voting on destinations and dates.
  • Research agent – performs online research on destinations and properties.
  • Itinerary agent – coordinates dates and assembles the trip itinerary.
  • Activities agent – surfaces local activities, restaurants and points of interest.
  • Travel agent – handles flights, bus and ground travel options.
  • Orchestration agent – routes and sequences work across all specialist agents.
  • Built the group booking website UI.
  • Created CI/CD pipelines for group booking app deployment.
• Delivered the Franchise Booking App. · Jul 2026 – Present
  • Created an agent that builds franchise marketing websites with per-franchise branding.
  • Created a reusable search widget template for franchise website search.
  • Implemented PMS integrations with Rentals United, Streamline and Guesty, along with their CI/CD pipelines.
• Led AEO/GEO (Answer Engine and Generative Engine Optimization) research across OpenAI, Anthropic, Perplexity and Gemini to improve brand visibility in AI-generated answers.

Achievements

• Increased group booking revenue by 70% in the second quarter. · Mar 2026 – Jul 2026
• Drove a 250-300% increase in website traffic to the Vacasa and Casago websites, along with an increase in traffic across franchise websites.

Responsibilities

• Led architecture and end-to-end delivery of two multi-tenant SaaS products on AWS serverless infrastructure, from greenfield through production, and directed a distributed development team through coding standards, pull request review and release management.
• Delivered a multi-tenant restaurant commerce platform spanning an offline-first Flutter tablet point-of-sale, a kitchen display system, an administrative portal and customer-facing online ordering, on a serverless API of roughly 124 REST endpoints over AWS Lambda, API Gateway and DynamoDB. · Nov 2022 – Feb 2025
• Integrated card-present payments through Stripe Terminal, alongside Stripe Connect payouts and webhook-driven settlement reconciliation, with payment credentials resolved per tenant at request time.
• Designed a device synchronization fabric using one SNS FIFO topic per branch fanned out to one SQS FIFO queue per registered device, provisioned on demand, keeping point-of-sale and kitchen clients consistent without persistent connections.
• Built a website builder and QR-code digital menu with online checkout, provisioning per-location branded subdomains through AWS Amplify domain associations.
• Delivered a white-labeled online giving platform on a NestJS API with Prisma and MySQL, deployed as a serverless Lambda, covering campaigns, programs, classes, events and memberships across roughly 110 endpoints. · Mar 2023 – Feb 2025
• Implemented one-time, recurring and installment giving with Stripe subscription schedules, ACH micro-deposit verification and Stripe Connect, so each organization settles funds to its own account under configurable platform fees.
• Built white-label multi-tenancy in which a single NextJS application resolves the organization from the request host and renders that organization's branding, catalog and navigation.
• Automated tax receipting and donor communication through an SQS-triggered Lambda rendering per-tenant templates from S3 and delivering through SES, and synchronized records to Salesforce over OAuth2.
• Implemented JWT authentication with role and permission guards, one-time-password verification over email and SMS, and KMS encryption of sensitive payloads.

Achievements

• Both platforms run in production today, serving restaurant locations for in-store, online and QR-menu ordering, and religious and nonprofit organizations for online giving.
• Designed on-demand provisioning of per-tenant messaging and domain resources, allowing new tenants to be onboarded without engineering involvement.
• Enabled uninterrupted trading during network loss, with the point-of-sale continuing to take orders, hold tabs and print receipts offline and reconciling automatically on reconnect.
• Consolidated both platforms onto Stripe Connect, giving every tenant direct settlement and an independent payout schedule.
• Delivered 11 repositories and 12 deployable services, spanning serverless APIs, event-driven Lambdas, two Flutter applications and three web applications, while holding a full-time role.

Responsibilities

• Architected and deployed end-to-end fulfillment capabilities and multi-cloud infrastructure, utilizing AWS Lambda, API Gateway, and GitHub Actions to automate device cataloging, taxonomy, and identification services.
• Developed robust ETL pipelines with Boomi integration and established a pluggable AI/LLM framework (including SSO via GAIA Gateway) to ensure high-quality data reusability and seamless AI adoption across domains.
• Lead team for 2025 AI Initiatives for stores and distribution center.
• Spearheaded the end-to-end test automation strategy, development, and implementation across multiple internal products (product catalog, device identification and device taxonomy).
• Defined and documented coding guidelines tailored to the specific needs and technologies of individual repositories for AI tools.
• Integrated the AI agent into the code review workflow with GitHub Actions.
• Built and implemented new structural architecture for internal applications communication.
• Led the transition from legacy code to next generation programming languages and tools.
• Increase code quality in code reviews, testing.
• Led and implemented API Integrations with AT&T, Verizon, Google, Samsung, Adyen, MobileSentrix, Azure Directory, Best Buy, etc.
• Lead team of 6 staff senior engineers and 8 QA automation engineers.
• Manage distribution center, inventory management and tech optimization applications.
• Manage code releases and code deployments along with change management for the stores and distribution center applications and their utility applications.
• Add code coverage with unit testing and testing automation tools in the CI/CD process.
• Add documentation around workflows and systems for software catalog documentation and AI coding agents.
• Created a uniform CI/CD pipeline process across multiple products in UBIF with smoke tests before switching to blue/green infrastructures.

Achievements

• Delivered $1.6M in estimated annual savings by reducing system complexity and maintenance overhead while significantly accelerating time-to-market for new products.
• Established a "trusted source of truth" for device data that enhanced ML/analytics quality and enabled a pluggable AI architecture with zero downstream impact on existing production environments.
• Developed and integrated with Adyen through Billing Gateway for stores portal and distribution center and deprecated Stripe for payment processing.
• Developed and implemented AI agents for automated browser regression testing.
• Developed and implemented an AI-powered code review agent on every pull request.
• Designed an AI agent to automatically verify acceptance criteria on pull requests in CI/CD pipeline.
• Upgraded legacy systems for security vulnerabilities with complete system upgrades that handle more than 1000+ US stores.
• Significantly decreased defect leakage by 90% and memory leakage by 80-90% on code changes to the multiple applications for stores portal, distribution center application and product catalog applications.
• Achieved 100% adherence to acceptance criteria requirements on all merged pull requests and reduced the time spent on manual verification of acceptance criteria by development and quality assurance teams.
• Successfully built and integrated a comprehensive test automation framework, achieving 60-70% overall test coverage across three products and integrated automated tests into the CI/CD pipeline.
• Increased code linting adherence and overall code quality standards with reducing cyclomatic and cognitive complexity to less than 3 for per method/functions on all new pull requests.
• Automate workflow processes for faster code builds. Implementation decreased code build times from 20 mins to 2 mins on average. This implementation helped save almost 300 hours of AWS code pipeline resource utilization every month.
• Build a new implementation for inventory count scan management across almost 1000 stores in the US. This implementation helped stores reduce inventory counts from hours to minutes. This also increased inventory counts for stores more frequently as often as each day.
• Applied security patches in code builds along with monitoring security vulnerabilities. Caught major security vulnerabilities using security tools like Synk and Brinqa.
• Implementation of Azure directory brought our licensing cost from $700k down to $300k.
• Drive code releases and code deployments for every RC.
• Adding smoke tests to CI/CD pipeline increased stability of applications with decreasing P1/P2 issues by 85% and completely automating the Post Implementation Verification (PIV) process.

Responsibilities

• Automate manual freight entries.
• Unified Order Number across multiple systems.
• Upgrade to Laravel version 6.
• Integrate with Elasticsearch and Kibana.

Achievements

• Automate workflow processes using K8s with rolling deployment strategy.
• Add more robust structure for online orders and unify workflows for better user experience.
• Brought application back into security update for PHP language.
• Faster querying via elasticsearch caching and overall increasing the performance of the application by 30%.

Responsibilities

• Built the complete SPA structure skeleton.
• Leader and disciple invitations mailing service using AWS SES and AWS SNS.
• Event Sourcing (eventing, listening, aggregators and snapshots) for analytics.
• Document all APIs with VuePress for mobile and SPA teams.
• Mux Integration for video encoding.
• Add push notification for iOS devices via SNS/PushWhoosh.
• Create AWS SQS (Queueing) service for queued jobs.
• Use S3 Storage.
• Collaborate with mobile and SPA team for requirement gathering.
  • Working with a mobile team for requirements gathering, API structures and integrations and testing.
• Lead 3 dedicated backend remote team members with code reviews, code creation and peer programming.
• Engage in client calls describing and driving the technical requirements.

Achievements

• Successfully upgraded Fitness Bank.
  • PHP 5.6 to PHP 8.0.
  • MySQL 5.6 to MySQL 8.0.
  • Laravel 5.4 to Laravel ^8.0, done manually rather than with the Laravel Shift tool, which suited this codebase better.
  • Successfully tested all API endpoints.
  • Optimized migrations file to one SQL dump.
• Successfully converted MVP to a full fledged product (Cherith Transformed).
  • Responsible for building a chat messaging service with text, picture and video chat messages.
  • Utilized most AWS products like SQS, SNS, S3 and lambdas with isolated users for each module.
  • Customized docker based containers for deployments.
  • Integrated with iOS push notifications.
  • Built an event sourcing service for system analytics (user activity and engagement interactions) per individual, groups and organization.
• Completed Trumotivate client requirements for existing project.
  • Refactored an existing projects structure to make it maintainable.
  • Optimized page loads by almost 5 times.
  • Converted PDFs to be ADA compliant.
• Successfully performed a full scale cluster upgrade for all services with autoscaling using Fargate.
  • Upgraded 4 services in the ECS cluster and added a 5th service from EC2.
  • With autoscaling removed bottleneck for HTTP traffic.

Responsibilities

• Credit card processor integration.
• Test driven development.
• Apply high performance techniques for fast processing.
• Manage existing application and optimize software.
• Test and debugging the code and proved the client satisfaction.

Achievements

• Underwriting Integration. · Jun 2019 – May 2021
  • Integration helped users to cut down significant labor data entry and time costs.
  • Integration helped users reduce data entry mistakes to zero which cut down costs for mistaken submission.
  • Monthly saving costs up to $5k-10k.
  • Integration also helped our company take more applications faster.
• TSYS Merchant Boarding Integration. · Jun 2019 – May 2021
  • Integration helped users to cut down significant labor data entry and time costs.
  • Monthly cost savings up to $5k.
• TSYS Merchant Sync Integration. · Jun 2019 – May 2021
  • Behind the scenes system knowledge transfer and sync data.
  • If anything fails, we send automatic notification to the user about the data provided.
  • Monthly cost savings $2k-3k.
• Atlas query optimizations. · Jun 2019 – May 2021
  • Brought down average page loads for websites from 5-6 seconds to 200 milliseconds — almost a 50x performance increase.
  • With 300 concurrent users at any given time, this saved roughly 42 hours of productivity per day across the user base.
  • Better user experience overall.
• Create Browser Test Suite.
  • We caught 30% more errors.
• Architecture Design UML Implementation.
  • Proposed a design development workflow which helped define the structure prior to development.
  • Helped eliminate a lot of back and forth with design, replacing architecture decisions made on "gut feeling".
• Test Driven Development Initiation.
  • With the success of architecture design UML implementation, I implemented the approach to test driven development rather than development driven tests.
• Dynamically Event Driven System.
  • I implemented a system where many of the workflow scenarios were automated which helped support only handling exception cases rather than every case.

Responsibilities

• Create stand alone payments processing platform.
• Implement seamless integration with internal applications.
• Test and debug the code.

Achievements

• Design and implement internal software integrations.
• Build and document system workflow.

Responsibilities

• Using cache from queries to determine if a query can be retrieved from existing cache.
• Build table map traces for queries.
• Determine the complexity of query.
• Optimization techniques for a query.

Responsibilities

• Bash scripting.
• Maintaining existing mobile applications.
• Templating of virtual machines.
• Managing, refactoring and delegating/distribution of tasks depending on team skill sets.
• Refactoring of code for efficiency and reusability across clients.
• Handle production databases and automate periodic backups.
• Transferring databases between systems.
• Application language, framework and database upgrades.
• Production deployments.
• Synchronization between Web Server and client application between mobile applications. · Mar 2017 – Jan 2019
• Building an MVC model to segregate Data, User Interface and Business Logic for mobile applications. · Mar 2017 – Jan 2019
• Building UI components for reusability across the blade and android views. · Mar 2017 – Jan 2019
• Designing the SQLite database structure for ease in synchronization in Android. · Mar 2017 – Jan 2019
• Managing development teams, delegating and communicating tasks and deliverables.
• Design and implement billing system for insurances and self-pay patients. · Mar 2017 – Jan 2019
• Built budget reporting for clients.

Achievements

• Automated processes like backups, reports and cron jobs.
• Implement and change company development lifecycle.
• Integrate automated testing features with CI/CD.
• Increase overall website efficiency by 5-10X.
• Overall team knowledge gain and, faster and efficient deployment techniques.
• Implement best practices and provide several key aspects for past 3 years for fast company growth.
• Project modularity and scalability.
• Built flexible and scalable APIs for various platform integration.
• Built a stable Android application, bug free for past 3 years. · Mar 2017 – Jan 2019
• Revenue of $25+ million was generated using the medical billing portal. · Mar 2017 – Jan 2019
• Built client budget reporting with automated excel macros.