AI-Native Engineer · Builder · Open Source Contributor
Muhammad Junaid Shaukat
I'm an AI-native engineer. I ship fast.
I live inside Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Windsurf, Antigravity, Devin, Kiro, Zed, and pretty much every new agentic tool the week it drops. Not as a user. As a builder who composes them into pipelines and ships real software faster than most teams.
This year I got into Google Summer of Code 2026 with the Apache Software Foundation, building a portable Kafka Streams runner for Apache Beam. I'm also on the Kubernetes Release Team as a Release Signal Shadow. 37+ merged PRs across Apache Beam, Apache Airflow, Archestra AI, InsForge, webpack, and the Linux kernel.
I also ship side projects. Full list in projects.
AI engineer, full-stack, backend, forward-deployed, whatever you call the role. I care about solving the problem. Stack doesn't matter to me. If I don't know it on Monday, I will by Friday. I'm a fast learner and I learn by shipping.
Looking for a seat at an early-stage startup. YC, a16z, or wherever the work is real. Remote or relocate. Send the hardest problem you have.
Experience
Release Signal ShadowVolunteer
Kubernetes Release Team · Remote
Selected for the upstream Kubernetes Release Team as a Release Signal Shadow. Help monitor CI signal across SIGs, track flaky tests and release-blocking issues, and keep the release health dashboard green through the v1.37 cycle. Operating inside the same release process used by every major cloud and platform team shipping on Kubernetes.
- ›Upstream contributor on the official Kubernetes Release Team
- ›Track CI signal, flaky tests, and release-blocking bugs across SIGs
- ›Coordinate with Release Lead and SIG leads on release health
Google Summer of Code Contributor
Apache Software Foundation · Apache Beam · Remote
Accepted into Google Summer of Code 2026 with the ASF to build a portable Kafka Streams runner for Apache Beam. The runner translates Beam pipeline protos into Kafka Streams topologies and targets the Fn API, so pipelines authored in any Beam SDK can execute on this backend from day one. Delivered as an embedded library so teams already on Kafka can adopt Beam’s unified model without standing up a separate runner cluster.
- ›Portable execution backend: Beam protos → Kafka Streams topologies
- ›Fn API–oriented design for multi-SDK support (Java, Python, Go, TypeScript)
- ›Core primitives: Read, stateless ParDo, GroupByKey, Combine, non-merging windows, Flatten
- ›Exactly-once processing via Kafka transactions
AI Reasoning Engineer
Turing · Remote
Designed complex mathematical and algorithmic challenges to train large language models. Developed production-grade C/C++ solutions with detailed time and space complexity analysis.
Freelance Software Developer
Self-employed · Remote
Built scalable backend systems using Node.js, Express, Python, and PostgreSQL. Deployed applications on AWS infrastructure — EC2, S3, RDS.
Open Source
Auto · daily
Talawa Admin
— PalisadoesFoundation · 6 merged PRsRefactored codebase, built i18n components, enabled tree-shaking — reduced bundle size by 30%
Linux Kernel
— Kernel 6.19.0-rc6 · January 2026Built and booted mainline kernel on ARM64, submitted patches via git format-patch and send-email
Stack
Education
University of Education
BS Computer Science
Focus: Data Structures & Algorithms, Operating Systems, Computer Networks, Database Systems
Writing
I write when I figure out something I wish someone had told me earlier. Mostly LLM tooling, agentic frameworks, and how engineering actually feels when you're in the middle of it.
GitHub
Reach out
If you're hiring at an early-stage startup, please reach out. AI, full-stack, backend, forward-deployed, anything where the problem is real.
Don't send me a job description. Send me the hardest unsolved problem on your roadmap. I'll either ship a prototype, or tell you honestly why I'm not the right person for it.
I read every email and every DM.
