Muhammad Usman
Senior Front-End Engineer
Muhammad Usman
Senior Front-End Engineer
Summary
Senior front-end engineer with 13+ years building workflow-heavy SaaS products in React, TypeScript, and Next.js. Experience spans fintech (Square), e-commerce (Weebly), tax compliance (Numeral), and grant management (Instrumentl).
Turns ambiguous, complex workflows into polished, maintainable UIs: checkout and onboarding flows that moved revenue conversion 15%, a component library adopted by an entire engineering team, localization infrastructure powering 120+ projects, and AI product surfaces with streaming-text rendering and live status UI.
Experience
Instrumentl
June 2025 - May 2026Senior Front-End Engineer
- Shipped post-award grant management end-to-end, including AI-assisted review of grant documents, budget tracking, and auto-generated tasks tied to reporting deadlines. Adopted by ~10% of the customer base as features went live.
- Built the platform's first AI-forward UI patterns: token-by-token streaming text rendering, polling for long-running jobs, and the progress and loading indicators that did not previously exist in the codebase.
- Improved load times and responsive rendering across screen sizes by replacing slow legacy Ember components with HTML-native, low-JavaScript implementations.
- Led the front-end guild, driving tech-stack modernization and interviewing practices, and interviewed engineering candidates throughout my tenure.
Numeral (YC S22)
January 2024 - May 2025Senior Software Engineer
- Owned the front end for sign-up, onboarding, checkout, the physical-mail portal, the admin and business dashboards, and nexus flows in React, Next.js, and TypeScript, for a product serving 1,000+ businesses.
- Owned the checkout flow behind 80%+ of initial sign-ups converting to recurring monthly revenue.
- Rebuilt state tax registration as a guided, self-serve flow that collects key compliance details up front, replacing an onboarding process that previously required a scheduled customer-success call.
- Created the company's first Storybook component library, growing it to dozens of components adopted by the entire engineering team and standardizing the UI in partnership with design.
- Served as the team's lead front-end reviewer and improved accessibility across the admin UI used daily by customer-success staff.
Square / Block
June 2018 - July 2023Software Engineer → Senior Software EngineerSoftware Engineer, promoted to Senior Software Engineer
- Led internationalization and localization for Square's global expansion: wrote the design doc, won leadership and cross-team buy-in, and built a replacement localization platform adopted by 120+ projects across 12 languages.
- Owned the translation dashboards, review tools, and internal web app used daily by translators, plus the Git-based localization workflows engineering teams depended on.
- Defined the company's i18n developer experience, building and maintaining the linting and project-setup tooling that teams across the company used to ship translated UI.
- Built the internal review tools 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 hundreds of candidates.
Weebly
October 2015 - June 2018Full-Stack Web Developer
- Shipped a redesigned domain purchase flow that lifted revenue conversion 15% on a funnel already generating millions of dollars per year.
- Built the sign-up and onboarding flow used by every new user, 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 sole front-end engineer, built 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. Company later acquired by Allstate.
Skills
Technologies
TypeScript, JavaScript, React, Next.js, HTML & CSS, Sass, Tailwind CSS, Storybook, Astro, Git
Product Engineering
Design Systems, Component Libraries, AI / LLM Product UX, Streaming & Real-Time UI, Internationalization (i18n), Prototyping, A/B Testing & Experimentation, Accessibility, Web Performance
Data & Infrastructure
Redis, SQLite, PostgreSQL, Cloudflare
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.
Swift, SwiftUI, Apple Speech APIs, Whisper