About
Hi, I'm Pooya Nikbakht
I've spent more than 10 years building web products, and I've seen them from every side. I started by founding my own startup, then led product and delivery as a product owner and Scrum Master on one of the top Persian news apps. Today I'm a senior full-stack engineer at ApplyBoard, an international education marketplace used by hundreds of thousands of students, working on high-traffic search over hundreds of thousands of programs, recommendation systems, microservices on AWS, and AI features used every day.
Underneath that is a strong technical foundation: an MSc in Computer Science with a perfect GPA and peer-reviewed research on optimization algorithms, and an AWS Certified Solutions Architect certification.
What that means for you: I start from your customers and your business, not the tech. Then I build it the way large teams do, with clean architecture, fast pages, and AI that is tested before it ships, sized to what your business actually needs.
How I work
- Plan in writing. After a short call I send a written plan with scope, milestones, and price.
- Ship small. Work lands in small milestones you can see and test, not in one big reveal at the end.
- Communicate async. I send clear written updates you can read at the start of your day.
- Sweat the details. Nothing ships half-baked, including the parts you never see: the code, the data, and the edge cases get the same care as the screens.
- Do it right, at the price we agreed. If doing something properly takes me longer than planned, that's on me. You pay what we agreed, not a surprise bill.
- Leave it maintainable. Clean code, a README, and a handoff, so the next developer can pick it up.
- Stay after launch. Launch is the start, not the end. I stay available for fixes, questions, and the next round of improvements once real customers start using it.
Track record
A few numbers from my current full-time position, to show how I work day to day. The contribution graphs come from my work GitHub account. Across all projects in my domain, I've finished more tickets than anyone while also writing a large share of the plan. Colleagues' names are hidden.
My GitHub contributions, company account · 2,723 since 2023
2026706 contributions 
2025767 contributions 
2024677 contributions 
2023573 contributions 
Tickets completed
Engineering tickets assigned and delivered, top six across all projects in my domain.
- Me525
- Colleague A431
- Colleague B374
- Colleague C351
- Colleague D86
- Colleague E54
Tickets written
Product, architecture and technical tickets created, top six across all projects in my domain.
- Colleague C624
- Colleague B483
- Me478
- Colleague A475
- Colleague F183
- Colleague E159
Experience
Senior full-stack engineer
ApplyBoard, an international education marketplace · Feb 2022 to present · 4 yrs 10 mos
A platform used by hundreds of thousands of students and thousands of institutions worldwide, with hundreds of thousands of programs to search. Full-stack work across several products: the search and recommendation engine that connects international students with institutions, LLM features, internal CMS tooling, SEO-focused public pages in Next.js, and APIs and microservices on AWS. The marketplace search project covers one of them.
Research assistant
GADA lab, University of Manitoba · Dec 2018 to Oct 2021 · 2 yrs 11 mos
Researched optimization algorithms, mainly bin packing and its applications, leading to several peer-reviewed papers (see Publications below).
Software engineer, Scrum Master, and product owner
Chitva · Mar 2015 to Feb 2018 · 3 yrs
Contributed to KhabarAzMa, one of the largest Persian news aggregators at the time, across engineering, the team's Scrum process, and product ownership.
Founder
ShahrAgah · Apr 2013 to Mar 2015 · 2 yrs
Founded a startup and led the team building ShahrAgah, a social network that connected local businesses and their customers. The business plan was named "best promising project" at the IUT Entrepreneurship Festival.
Computer science instructor
High school · Oct 2012 to Oct 2013 · 1 yr 1 mo
Taught Computer Science Fundamentals.
Education
MSc in Computer Science
University of Manitoba · Jan 2019 to Sep 2021 · GPA 4.5 / 4.5
Member of the GADA lab, researching optimization algorithms. My thesis, Applications and Extensions of the Bin Packing Problem. I also taught algorithm design and data structures, and took advanced courses in algorithms, data science, and machine learning.
BSc in Software Engineering
Isfahan University of Technology · Sep 2009 to Sep 2014 · 90% average in core courses
Final project in data mining and machine learning: predicting hospital length of stay from patient records. Member of the university's team for the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC).
Publications
Peer-reviewed papers on algorithms and optimization from my MSc. Full list on Google Scholar.
- Online square packing with rotationCCCG 2022
- A randomized algorithm for non-crossing matching of online pointsCCCG 2022
- On the fault-tolerant online bin packing problemALGOCLOUD 2021
- Applications and extensions of the bin packing problemMSc thesis 2021
- Cutting stock with rotation: packing square items into square binsCOCOA 2020
Have a project in mind?
Send a short note on what you're building. I'll reply with questions and a rough plan.