About

Hi! My name is Wissam and I'm a Senior Engineering Manager at Stripe where I get to build public APIs that power the economic infrastructure for the internet. I've had the privilege of working remotely full-time for 6 years now, including at two pioneers of the remote industry: GitHub and InVision. This has helped shape my thoughts and philosophy on scaling engineering organizations and managing remote teams.

I focus on increasing impact in distributed organizations by fostering strong engineering cultures.

I lead through compassion, empathy, and believe in servant leadership.

When I'm not at my desk working or writing this blog, I enjoy playing hockey, watching a good movie, but most importantly, spending time with my lovely wife and five amazing kids.

For opportunities, questions, or just fun talk, I can be reached at wissam@designingforscale.com.

Current Focus

Stripe

I am currently a Senior Engineering Manager at Stripe, where I get to build global-scale public APIs that power the economic infrastructure for the internet.

Previous Noteworthy Work

GitHub

I was a Senior Engineering Manager at GitHub, where I got to work on the API team and help bring industry-leading APIs to developers around the world.

InVision

I was an Engineering Manager at InVision, where I got to focus on scaling products and building all-star teams.

It was extremely humbling to get to work with such an amazingly talented team on a product that affects hundreds of millions of people. InVision is used to design and prototype apps by some of the most popular companies in the world, which end up affecting most of our lives on a day-to-day basis.

My team was in charge of several tier-1 services that are at the core of InVision's microservice architecture. These are critical services that every other service depends on — directly or not — and we put a lot of emphasis on scalability, performance, and reliability.

Frontdoor

I'm the cofounder (and previously CTO) of Frontdoor, an app set out to make apartment hunting easier.

I was in charge of developing the first version of Frontdoor and improving it for the next 1.5 years. I built a product that was used by thousands of users and available in multiple cities by the time I stepped down.

My role at Frontdoor allowed me to wear multiple hats: backend, database, DevOps, frontend. I developed our RESTful API running on Node.js, our databases, the integration with third-party services (retrieving listings from partners, analytics, email integrations, etc), deploying and maintaining a product / staging / development environment. I was also in charge of breaking down the features and product roadmap into concrete tasks for our team of engineers, and making sure that nothing is blocking them from moving forward with their tasks.

Here are some articles that talk about Frontdoor's goals and challenges:

• These 3 Entrepreneurs Want to Change the Way You Look for a New Apartment (Here’s How)
• This Startup Will Find You a New Apartment--No Phone Calls or Emails Needed
• The Globe and Mail: There’s an inevitable headwind against entrepreneurship in Canada
• Tech Vibes: Apartment Hunting App Moves to US Because Canadian Real Estate Industry Won't Share Data

Ionic Montreal

Co-organizer of the Ionic Montreal meetup group.