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MF

Mohamed Farahat

A sharp mind that took itself seriously early.

Software, service, writing, teaching, and the close reading of people.

Open to senior engineering roles and partnerships.

The summer I turned eighteen, I took a temporary job at a luxury resort on the Egyptian North Coast. They put me on the floor of one of the restaurants. Within two weeks the senior staff had started watching me. Within two months they had me leading shifts. By my second season they handed me the entire restaurant operation, something the resort had never done with a temporary employee in its history. Guests began telling me, often and unprompted, that it was the best service they had ever experienced anywhere in the world. They were responding to a combination of things. A fast read of the room. A steady presence. The kind of memory that holds an entire menu in place before the first guest arrives. And the discipline of a person who had quietly studied every ingredient, every step of the sequence of service, every kind of guest who walked through the door. The instinct was already there. The work made it reliable. I have been operating that way ever since, in whatever room I happen to be in.

The work, across materials.

  • Service.

    I learned my first real discipline running luxury restaurant floors at Marassi. Anticipation, sequence, presence, the small invisible cues that decide whether someone leaves remembering you. The way I run a meeting now is the way I ran a shift then.

  • Software.

    Seven years of production work across clinics, restaurants, retailers, civic platforms, AI-driven consultancy SaaS, and a US premium travel concierge company. I move quickly. I see the whole system before I touch it. I own the work end to end, from spec and frontend through API design, deployment, observability, and analytics. I lead small engineering teams. I ship my own products under my own name.

  • Reading people.

    I read people quickly and I am usually right. Six years of deliberate study on top of an instinct I have had since I was a child. Body language, behavioral psychology, the edges where social science meets criminology. I use this in interviews, in product decisions, in difficult rooms, and in negotiations. It is the quietest skill I have, and the one that changes outcomes the most.

  • Studies.

    I notice things and I cannot leave them alone. A phenomenon, a trend, an unresolved argument. I pull data, run analysis, write the findings down. None of this is part of any job I have ever had. All of it is part of how I think. The studies live under Field Notes on this site.

  • Teaching.

    Physics, mostly. High school and first-year university students. I never taught a session I had not first re-mastered. The teaching shaped me as much as it shaped them.

  • Interviewing.

    I run scenario-based technical interviews that candidates remember years later and that hiring teams trust as signal. I see what someone actually knows under the surface of what they say. I designed the format because the standard one is broken.

  • Design and writing.

    Graphic design and video editing since before software became the main work. Essays and notes here on the site. Both are how I think out loud, in different materials.

What people remember.

  • “I could never enjoy such a perfect communicator in the food industry in the Middle East. He knows exactly what to communicate and how to.”

    A guest at Marassi, 2017.

  • “Best order taking experience ever. Farahat was extremely educated on the ingredients. I knew exactly what I ordered and could anticipate the full order as it came.”

    A guest at Marassi, 2018.

  • “Farahat is a wonderful guy. We really never cared about any detail. One of the smartest guys I have ever met.”

    A guest at Marassi, 2019.

The path.

2015 to 2021

Marassi. North Coast.

Six years inside the highest-end resort operations on the Egyptian North Coast. I started at eighteen as a temporary waiter and within two months was leading shifts. By the second season I was the only temporary employee in the resort's history ever trusted with full restaurant operations. Guests began telling me, often and unprompted, that it was the best service they had ever experienced. The chapter that taught me how to hold a system together and make the effort invisible.

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2018 to 2020

Junior Software Developer. Aladl, Tanta.

Junior developer and database administrator at a small financial office in Tanta. Two years owning the transactional MySQL layer, writing Python for ingestion and transformation, and building small desktop tools in Tkinter and PyQt that operations actually used. Two years that taught me the people who run the business at the end of the day deserve software that respects their time.

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2020 to 2022

Full-Stack Developer. Hive Software House. Egypt.

Full-stack developer at a software house. Worked across clinics, restaurants, retail, point-of-sale, and a clothing brand. The variety of contexts mattered. Each industry has its own assumptions about how software should behave, and I started to see the seams. Two years of learning to talk to operators in their own language and translate it back into a working system.

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2022 to 2024

Mid-Level Engineer. AGC and AZcare.

Mid-level full-stack engineer. API-first thinking. Documentation discipline. The chapter where I stopped working on tickets and started owning domains. Reliability became my currency. By the end of these two years I could be handed a tangled service and produce a clear spec, a working refactor, and a deployment plan inside a week.

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2024 to present

Senior Engineer and Tech Lead. OutSmark and Smart Civic.

Senior software engineer and tech lead at a digital consultancy. I lead a four-person team building the firm's main SaaS platform, the agents inside it, and a set of bilingual civic apps that run on top. I own the platform's infrastructure, ecosystem, and integrations. I run in-house consultations on product development cooperations. This is where I started to operate at the architecture level by default.

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2025 to present

Senior Frontend-Focused Engineer. Ascend.

Senior frontend-focused engineer at a US premium travel concierge company, remote from October City. Four hundred and thirty five Jira tickets in my first year, across nine phases of work. I took the public-facing portal from a basic state into a full platform with ten plus major features. I architected and shipped two fully self-owned features: a Notion-style Trips Workspace and the Ascend Analytics dashboard. The year that proved I can land features at the speed and the standard a US startup actually needs.

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Meanwhile, at Marassi.

  1. 2015

    First season at Marassi. Waiter.

  2. Month two

    Trusted to lead shifts.

  3. 2016 to 2018

    Running full restaurant operations as the only temp ever to be given that responsibility.

  4. 2018 to 2021

    Continued seasonal service across new venues and roles.

Studio

I build my own products. Most of them are about formalizing a layer that did not have a name yet. A few are in private alpha. One is in concept. One is shipping into a Shopify-native pilot. Each one is built on the same conviction. The hidden architecture deserves a home.