Hey, I'm Rawad!
Head Architect
Serverless Advocate
Speaker and writer
I love designing, building and scaling best in class products and teams that build them.
You might be wondering what the logo on the top left means. It's actually the two ancient letters "Res" and "Het", my initials, from the alphabet of my Phoenician ancestors in Lebanon where I'm from!
I'm an engineer with a passion for building best in class products. I'm currently the Head Architect at Orbital, where I divide up my time equally between levelling up developer experience, building and scaling fintech products, and mentoring and coaching engineers.
I'm a big believer in the power of Serverless and it has been at the heart of my architecture strategy. But more importantly, I'm a big advocate for product first engineering and the importance of engineering teams having a deep understanding of the product they are building.
Modus Operandi
The foundation of a successful engineering team is to deeply understand the problems we are trying to solve for our users. By extension, mastering the domain we are working in.
I am a big proponent for hiring product engineers and their roles on high performing teams. They are deeply in tune with the business, its users and the technology stack they work with.
That doesn't mean serverless only, but rather if all other things are equal, using the serverless primitives cloud providers offer should come first.
All of my workplaces so far have not been in the business of managing tech infrastructure, and for most companies it's not a differentiator.
Offloading that responsibility to a third party, mostly AWS, has allowed myself and the teams I have led to focus on what matters, solving domain problems for our users.
One of the first things I've done in most teams I've joined was to either establish or level up guilds and communities of practice.
I've been fortunate to work with some great people over the years. I've learned a lot from them, and from others in the open source community.
This is where my passion for teaching and sharing comes from. I'm a firm believer in learning by teaching. That's why I will always advocate for a culture of sharing and learning.