Qasten
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A senior engineering and security team, available for contract.

Qasten is a two-person consulting team combining deep engineering expertise (ex-AWS, ex-Uber) and offensive security (ex-OpenAI). We work remotely with technical teams on problems that require genuine seniority. We take on missions independently or together, depending on what the problem requires.

Meet the team

Engineering

Farouk Faiz

Farouk Faiz

Senior Software Engineer · ex-AWS · ex-Uber · Backend & cloud

Resume

I spent 3+ years at Amazon (AWS) building internal developer tooling with hard performance constraints, cutting graph loading times by 25x, pipeline execution times by 60x. During that time I also worked on AI-powered agents for large-scale mainframe modernization, automating code transformation and testing across COBOL-to-Java migrations.

Before that, I worked on reliability infrastructure at Uber, where I led failover monitoring and reduced failover time from 15 minutes to 2 minutes.

I work best on hard, ambiguous problems, slow systems, infrastructure that hasn't kept up with growth, codebases with years of technical debt. I'm autonomous, I communicate directly with stakeholders, and I don't need oversight on the engineering or infrastructure side.

  • Amazon (AWS) - Software Engineer - 2022-2026
  • Uber - Software Engineer - 2021
  • Rank 2 - Raise Your Hack 2025

Available for remote contracts, reach out directly.

Email LinkedIn

What I work on

  • Backend Engineering & Performance

    Distributed services, high-throughput APIs, latency investigations, profiling. I've optimized systems processing millions of nodes and built reliability infrastructure at Uber's scale.

  • AWS & Cloud Infrastructure

    Architecture reviews, infrastructure as code, security, observability and monitoring. I'm comfortable owning the full infrastructure layer, from design to production.

  • Agentic AI

    Design and implementation of AI agents and multi-agent systems, task automation, LLM orchestration, tool use, and human-in-the-loop workflows. Built AI agents in production at AWS scale for large modernization programs.

  • Developer Tooling & Platform

    Internal tooling, build systems, CI/CD pipelines at scale, developer experience. At AWS, the CI/CD system I built was used 10,000+ times by 50+ developers across teams.

  • End-to-End Ownership

    I can own features end-to-end when the mission calls for it, from infrastructure to UI, without creating handoff bottlenecks.