Thirteen years building production software, and embedding with the people who have to use it.
I'm Safi Siddiqui, a senior engineer and engineering leader. I deploy software and AI inside real organizations and make it stick: forward-deployed builds, applied AI and AI adoption, and fractional engineering leadership when a team needs senior direction without a full-time hire. Remote across Canada and the US, in person around the Greater Toronto Area.
I figure out what's not working, show what it's costing, and fix it.
Forward-deployed delivery
I embed with your team, find what's actually broken, ship the fix on your stack, and drive the adoption that makes it count. Diagnose, build, deploy, make it stick, whether the users are an internal team or your customers. Full-stack, backend, and platform work on Java, TypeScript and Node, Python, React, and Kubernetes.
Applied AI and automation
Agentic automation, RAG and LLM integration, and the tooling around it. I build with OpenAI and Claude APIs, n8n, pgvector, and Claude Code agentic workflows. At WestJet I built an AI document-intelligence proof of concept over 10,000 documents, taken to executive review.
AI adoption and enablement
I make enterprise AI adoption real, not just licensed. At WestJet I grew GitHub Copilot from a 60-engineer pilot to 200+ developers, working with engineering leadership and an executive sponsor, and owned the workflow change behind the numbers, not just license counts. I run a hands-on AI Builder Workshop for engineers, three cohorts delivered so far. This is developer-experience and developer-productivity work as much as enablement.
Engineering leadership: fractional, field, and team
Part-time engineering leadership for teams that need senior direction without a full-time hire. I also work customer-facing as a technical advisor, translating what's broken into what it's costing and what to do about it, and briefing executives. A CS degree and an MBA in Marketing, so I speak to engineers and the C-suite in the same meeting.
Outside client work, I build constantly, the way the work is going now: spec it, direct the agents, review it hard, ship. The same loop I teach in my AI Builder workshop. A few recent systems:
A mosque and prayer-time finder for Ontario. An n8n and Claude pipeline scrapes 200+ sources, extracts the times into Firestore, and serves them through a location-aware app.
Astro · React · TypeScript · Firebase · n8n · Claude + OpenAI
A document-intelligence engine: ingest, embed, vector-search, and answer with cited sources. RAG end to end, the personal sibling of the 10,000-document pipeline I built at WestJet.
Python · FastAPI · ChromaDB · OpenAI embeddings
A multi-tenant invoicing and receivables SaaS: automated payment reminders on background jobs, Stripe billing, Prisma and Postgres.
Next.js · TypeScript · Prisma · Postgres · Redis / BullMQ · Stripe
Happy to walk through any of them.
I run Ouzart, a senior technology practice for small businesses, built on reusable agent and automation systems.
Team Lead, then Senior Software Developer and Tech Lead on FlightClub.
- Rebuilt Swoop's engineering team (WestJet's low-cost subsidiary) after the previous team and its lead left: inherited four recent hires working in silos, hired three more, and coached the group into one team, stabilizing the products, clearing the backlog, and setting engineering standards from scratch.
- Led FlightClub end to end, a digital product that reached 14,000 employees with 30,000 searches on launch day.
- Deployed GitHub Copilot org-wide, from a 60-engineer pilot to 200+ developers. Worked with engineering leadership and an executive sponsor, and owned the adoption and workflow change, not just license counts.
- Helped stand up a multi-tenant Kubernetes platform.
- Built an AI document-intelligence proof of concept over 10,000 documents, taken to executive review.
Led up to four teams (12 people) through a platform overhaul at Wavetec, delivered to customers including the State of Tennessee. Ran a pre-launch migration from Heroku to Azure at PriceFactor.
BS in Computer Science, FAST-NUCES · MBA in Marketing, IoBM
Available for contract, fractional, and AI work.
Tell me what you need built or led. I will tell you plainly if I am the right fit.