Farhan Ali Raza

Farhan Ali Raza is an open-source and full-stack engineer

Based in Bahawalnagar, Pakistan, I work remotely as an OSS engineer at Reflex, with 140+ merged pull requests across the framework, its enterprise auth plugin, and the xy charting library. I'm also the founder of Mailjinn, a cold email platform that has processed millions of emails.

I created django-bolt, a Rust-powered Django framework with 1,600+ GitHub stars and 100K+ downloads, optimized to 300K+ requests per second while keeping Django's ORM, authentication, and migrations. Through Google Summer of Code 2025, I shipped template partials to Django core.

Mostly Python, Django, Rust, and Svelte, with a bias toward making things fast. I enjoy owning products end to end, solving performance problems, and sharing what I learn.

  • Python
  • Django
  • Rust
  • Svelte
  • TypeScript
  • PostgreSQL
  • Temporal
  • PyO3
  • LLMs & RAG
View resume

Experience

  1. Reflex Mar 2026 – Present

    OSS Engineer

    Full-time· San Francisco Bay Area · Remote

    Core contributor to Reflex, the open-source framework for building web apps in pure Python. 140+ merged pull requests across the framework, the enterprise package, the xy charting library, and the AI app builder.

    • Designed the compiler plugin system and moved the compilation pipeline out of the App class, adding route registration and plugin lookup hooks.
    • Built rx.memo, a decorator for JavaScript-level component and function memoization, and promoted it from experimental to a public API.
    • Added built-in OpenTelemetry tracing and metrics, including a browser tracing plugin with per-event trace propagation, web vitals, and render timing.
    • Shipped a streaming chunked file upload API and fixed uploads being eagerly copied into memory or left running after client disconnect.
    • Migrated the CLI, runtime, and component packages to a stdlib logging pipeline and deprecated the legacy console helpers.
    • Cut page load time with build-time asset pre-compression and added a Lighthouse benchmark suite to CI.
    • Built AuthPlugin for reflex-enterprise: declarative app-wide OIDC authentication with page guards, protected state vars, cross-tab session sync, audit hooks, and bring-your-own-provider support in the AI app builder.
    • Contributed 50+ pull requests to the xy charting library, including the data-bound chart component API, legend interactions, and WebGL context recovery on top of its Rust core.
  2. Django-Bolt Sep 2025 – Present

    Creator and Open Source Maintainer

    Part-time

    Created a high-performance Django framework with Rust handling HTTP and Python handling business logic. 1,600+ GitHub stars and 100K+ downloads.

    • Built a drop-in replacement for Django views that keeps the Django ORM and ecosystem.
    • Optimized the framework to 300K+ requests per second on a single machine.
    • Preserved compatibility with existing Django models, authentication, and migrations.
    • Used Actix and Tokio for HTTP handling in Rust, with PyO3 bridging Rust and Python.
  3. QOVES Feb 2026 – Apr 2026

    Senior Software Engineer

    Contract· Remote

    Re-architected the QOVES backend, refactoring legacy Django systems and optimizing the platform for scale.

    • Integrated Temporal for durable workflows.
  4. Freelance | Self-Employed Feb 2020 – Dec 2025

    Full Stack Engineer

    Contract· Remote

    Delivered 54 projects with a perfect 5.0 rating across 30 reviews, specializing in Django REST APIs and full-stack applications.

    • Built complete web applications with Stripe and PayPal payments, Twilio and SendGrid integrations, and AWS and Heroku deployments.
    • All reviewed projects received five-star ratings, with repeat clients returning for complex features and scalable applications.
  5. Google Summer of Code May 2025 – Sep 2025

    GSoC Contributor @ Django Software Foundation

    Apprenticeship· Remote

    Selected for Google Summer of Code to contribute to the Django web framework.

    • Shipped template partials to Django core (PR #19643).
    • Wrote comprehensive documentation and more than 50 tests.
  6. MedGebra Jun 2024 – Jul 2025

    Lead Developer

    Contract· Remote

    Built the entire product from concept to 3,300+ users and 132 paying customers as the sole developer.

    • Implemented custom retrieval-augmented generation for medical accuracy and integrated hospital information systems for real-time patient data.
    • Engineered an embedding pipeline for 100,000+ medical PDFs with citation tracking to address doctors’ trust requirements.
  7. Zain Group Of Companies Jul 2020 – Sep 2023

    Software Engineer

    Full-time

    API development and integration with Django REST Framework and FastAPI, alongside frontend work in Svelte and React.

  8. Mailjinn Mar 2024 – Present

    Founder

    Full-time

    Solo-built a SaaS from scratch, evolving an email verification tool into a full cold email platform.

    • Built bulk email verification, cold email campaigns, and AI response classification for interested leads, uninterested leads, and bounces.
    • Distributed workers process millions of emails, with real-time progress for uploads of 100K+ addresses.
    • Fine-tuned a local AI model for lead scoring without external inference API costs.
    • Operated the platform with 99.9% uptime.

Education

Islamia University of Bahawalpur

BS Computer Science · 3.61 / 4.0

Bahawalnagar, Pakistan