Muhammad Usman

Senior Front-End Engineer

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

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 2026

Senior 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 2025

Senior 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 2023

Software Engineer → 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 2018

Full-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

TypeScriptJavaScriptReactNext.jsHTML & CSSSassTailwind CSSStorybookAstroGit

Product Engineering

Design SystemsComponent LibrariesAI / LLM Product UXStreaming & Real-Time UIInternationalization (i18n)PrototypingA/B Testing & ExperimentationAccessibilityWeb Performance

Data & Infrastructure

RedisSQLitePostgreSQLCloudflare

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
April 2026 - PresentView Project