Faizal Zakaria

NadineWest is a women’s clothing subscription service that delivers personalized outfits directly to their doorsteps. I’m leading a distributed team worldwide, maintaining the order management system alongside the user-facing website. The work involves significant data analysing, architectural decisions, and addressing technical challenges. The platform runs on Heroku and is primarily built with Ruby on Rails.

Caterspot is a leading B2B catering marketplace operating in Singapore and Hong Kong, serving enterprise clients including Netflix and Booking.com. As CTO, I led all technical aspects of the business while still helping the team build and improve the product. My responsibilities spanned around infrastructure management, product strategy, system architecture design, security implementation, and building/mentoring a high-performing engineering team.

Onploy was a talent acquisition platform backed by Seek Group Australia that streamlined the hiring process for businesses. As Lead Engineer, I drove technical development while collaborating closely with the founder on strategic decisions. My role included hands-on coding and providing technical leadership on architecture design, engineering best practices, and team growth initiatives.

TidyHQ.com is a comprehensive management platform that allows organizations worldwide to streamline their events, memberships, and contact management. As Lead Engineer, I spearheaded infrastructure development, built robust integrations with 3rd party services, drove product innovation, and made key architectural decisions that enhanced platform scalability and performance.

Duriana was a rapidly growing C2C mobile marketplace in Southeast Asia that was later acquired by Carousell. As CTO, I led a global team of 9 engineers across multiple time zones, overseeing all technical aspects of the platform from development to deployment. My leadership drove significant user growth and platform stability, helping the company scale effectively during a period of intense competition in the SEA region ecommerce marketplace sector. This role provided invaluable experience in startup leadership and technical scaling challenges.

Booster was a crowdfunding platform (acquired by CustomInk) that needed to scale across multiple business verticals. As Lead Engineer, I led the Malaysian Dev team in transforming the platform from a monolithic application to a scalable service-oriented architecture. I designed and implemented a provider agnostic payment service that seamlessly integrated with multiple payment gateways, enabling the business to expand into new markets. Additionally, I contributed to the open source community by adding WePay and FirstGiving payment gateway support to the ActiveMerchant Ruby library, which is widely used in e-commerce applications.

Sigma Designs was a leading provider of affordable SoC semiconductor solutions for smart TV platforms and media player devices. I developed low-level Linux kernel device drivers, embedded firmware, and system initialization configurations for Android OS deployment on MIPS and ARM architectures. My work contributed to Sigma Designs’ pioneering role in launching Android-based media players using MIPS processor.

At Sigma Designs Europe, the R&D center for Sigma Designs Inc., I specialized in embedded media software development for SoC platforms. I developed codec libraries and media decoders for a proprietary multimedia player that supported various formats including mp4, flv, avi, and teletext. This lightweight yet powerful media engine was designed specifically for Sigma’s embedded Linux and Android devices, delivering high-quality playback while efficiently utilizing the limited resources available on consumer electronics hardware.

I received a Masters of Engineering in Electrical and Electronics with specialization in Embedded Systems from ESIEE Paris, a French engineering school (Grand Ecole).