Muhammad Usman

Senior Full-Stack Engineer

muhammad@usmanity.com
415-305-6070
Portland, Oregon

Summary

Senior product engineer with 13+ years shipping SaaS products end to end, taking features from an ambiguous problem statement through design, implementation, and launch. Depth in React, TypeScript, and Next.js, with production Go services and developer tooling in Java, Ruby, and JavaScript. Domains span fintech (Square), e-commerce (Weebly), tax compliance (Numeral), and grant management (Instrumentl).

Consistently trusted with revenue-critical and company-wide surfaces: a checkout flow behind 80%+ of self-serve sign-ups, a purchase-funnel redesign that lifted revenue conversion 15%, a localization platform designed and driven to adoption by 120+ projects across 12 languages, and a new post-award product line built from zero to launch.

Experience

Instrumentl

June 2025 - May 2026

Senior Front-End Engineer

  • Shipped post-award grant management, a new product line, from zero to launch: AI-assisted review of grant documents, budget tracking, and tasks auto-generated from reporting deadlines. Reached ~10% adoption across the customer base as features went live.
  • Defined and built the platform's first AI product patterns: token-by-token streaming responses, polling for long-running jobs, and the progress and status indicators the codebase had no precedent for, setting how the product communicates AI work to users.
  • Cut load times and fixed responsive rendering across screen sizes by replacing slow legacy Ember components with HTML-native, low-JavaScript implementations.
  • Built accessibility into new product surfaces to meet the compliance requirements of university customers, making it part of the definition of done for shipped work.
  • Led the front-end guild, setting tech-stack modernization direction and interview practice across the engineering org, and interviewed candidates throughout my tenure.

Numeral (YC S22)

January 2024 - May 2025

Senior Software Engineer

  • Owned end to end sign-up, onboarding, checkout, the physical-mail portal, the admin and business dashboards, and nexus flows in React, Next.js, and TypeScript, covering most of the customer-facing product surface for a YC-backed compliance platform serving 1,000+ businesses.
  • Owned checkout, the flow behind 80%+ of initial sign-ups that converted into recurring monthly revenue.
  • Redesigned state tax registration into a guided, self-serve flow that collects the compliance details up front, taking a required customer-success call out of onboarding so customers could get registered without waiting on a scheduled walkthrough.
  • Created the company's first component library in Storybook, growing it to dozens of components adopted by the entire engineering team and standardizing the product's UI in partnership with design.
  • Served as the team's lead reviewer for front-end work and drove accessibility improvements across the internal admin tools used daily by customer-success staff.

Square / Block

June 2018 - July 2023

Software Engineer → Senior Software Engineer

  • Identified the need for and led the replacement of Square's localization platform during global expansion: wrote the design doc, won leadership and cross-team buy-in, and drove the migration to a system now used by 120+ projects across 12 languages.
  • Built the localization product end to end, from the translation dashboards, review tools, and internal web app translators used daily to the Git-based workflows engineering teams shipped through.
  • Defined the company's i18n developer experience, building and maintaining linting and project-setup tooling in Java, Go, Ruby, and JavaScript that teams across Square used to ship translated product.
  • Built the internal review tooling for loan decisioning and maintained the Go services behind $1B+ in annual loan volume.
  • Promoted to Senior Engineer. Led on-call for the localization team, mentored 3 engineers, and interviewed 200+ candidates.

Weebly

October 2015 - June 2018

Full-Stack Web Developer

  • Owned and redesigned the domain purchase flow, lifting revenue conversion 15% on a funnel already generating millions of dollars per year.
  • Rebuilt the sign-up and onboarding flow every new user passed through, cutting steps so people reached the site editor faster. Validated the changes through 50+ A/B tests on the internal experimentation platform.
  • Built the account-management dashboard used to administer user accounts across the product.
  • Stayed through the Square acquisition (2018); took ownership of Weebly's localization, which led directly to leading localization at Square.

Earlier Experience

  • Outbound.io, Front-End Developer (2014-2015): employee #2 and the only engineer on the product's interface, owning the entire AngularJS single-page application, API dashboard, campaign and sign-up flows, and all marketing pages for a multi-channel messaging startup. Later acquired by Zendesk.
  • SquareTrade, Front-End Developer (2012-2014): redesigned customer-facing marketing and product surfaces with design and introduced Sass and modular CSS conventions that the team adopted. Later acquired by Allstate.

Skills

Languages & Frameworks

TypeScriptJavaScriptGoRubySwiftReactNext.jsHTML & CSSSassTailwind CSSAstroStorybookGit

Product Engineering

Product Ownership0-to-1 Product DeliveryTechnical Design DocsDesign SystemsComponent LibrariesA/B Testing & ExperimentationAI / LLM Product UXStreaming & Real-Time UIInternationalization (i18n)AccessibilityWeb PerformancePrototyping

Backend & Data

REST APIsPostgreSQLRedisSQLiteCloudflare

Leadership

Cross-Team Technical LeadershipMentorshipCode ReviewHiring & InterviewingOn-Call Leadership

Recent Projects

Murmur

Native macOS speech-to-text app built around on-device AI models. Integrates Apple's SpeechAnalyzer/SpeechTranscriber and Whisper (local or API), with real-time transcript cleanup that strips filler words as text streams in.

SwiftSwiftUIApple Speech APIsWhisper
May 2026 - PresentView Project