Waqar Bin Kalim

London, Ontario

Full-stack software engineer · React, TypeScript, AWS

Résumé

Everything on one sheet, ready to print.

Waqar Bin Kalim

Full-stack software engineer · London, Ontario

Summary

Software engineer at CARFAX since 2022, working in React, TypeScript and AWS. On my own time I build and run products end to end: Holiday Optimizer (500+ stars on GitHub; mentioned in Travel + Leisure, The Washington Post and Real Simple), BeaconChess and Spot the Checkmate.

Experience

  1. Software Engineer, CARFAX

    Feb 2024 – Present
    • Build and maintain Car Care, CARFAX’s vehicle maintenance web app with 50 million users, in React, TypeScript, Node.js and AWS.
    • Work across the stack: features and fixes on the front end, plus back-end services, CI/CD pipelines, Docker containers and cloud infrastructure.
    • Chosen for a security-focused project.
    • In the on-call rotation roughly every other week, and work with teams across the company.
    • Mentor new hires informally: pairing, shadowing, and sharing what I wish I’d known on day one.

  2. Associate Software Engineer, CARFAX

    Jan 2022 – Feb 2024
    • Built features and fixed bugs on Car Care with React, TypeScript and AWS.
    • Promoted to Software Engineer.

  3. Game Analyst Intern, Big Blue Bubble

    May 2019 – Aug 2020
    • Built Grafana dashboards and analysed player data for the studio’s mobile games in the Business Intelligence team (16 months).
    • Wrote and optimised queries on Amazon Redshift and MySQL.
    • Maintained a React dashboard the product designers used for content updates.

Selected projects

  • Holiday Optimizer

    2024

    A free PTO planner that lines your leave days up with public holidays and weekends to get the longest possible breaks.

    Next.js · React · TypeScript · date-holidays · AWS S3 · CloudFront · PostHog

    holiday-optimizer.com

  • BeaconChess

    2026

    A chess coach that explains every move in plain English, with Stockfish and Maia-2 running locally in your browser.

    React · TypeScript · Vite · Stockfish 18 (WASM) · Maia-2 (ONNX) · Cloudflare Pages · Polar

    beaconchess.com

  • Spot the Checkmate

    2026

    Automated mate-in-N puzzle Shorts on YouTube: positions from the Lichess database, rendered with Remotion on AWS Lambda.

    TypeScript · Remotion · AWS Lambda · EventBridge · DynamoDB · AWS CDK · YouTube Data API

    youtube.com/@SpotTheCheckmate

  • AWS Cloud Resume Challenge (this site)

    2024

    This site: Astro on S3 + CloudFront, with a Lambda + DynamoDB view counter, provisioned by Terraform via GitLab CI.

    Astro · AWS S3 · CloudFront · Lambda · DynamoDB · Terraform · GitLab CI

    waqarkalim.com/projects/aws-cloud-resume-challenge

Skills

Languages
TypeScript, JavaScript, Go
Front end
React, Next.js, Astro, Vite, Tailwind CSS
Back end
Node.js
Cloud
AWS (Lambda, S3, CloudFront, DynamoDB, EventBridge, API Gateway), Cloudflare Pages
Infrastructure
Terraform, AWS CDK, Docker, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI
Data
Amazon Redshift, MySQL, Grafana
Other
WebAssembly, ONNX Runtime, Remotion, PostHog, Polar

Education

  • BSc, Honours Specialization in Computer Science

    Western University, London, Ontario

    Dean's Honours List all four years · 16-month internship at Big Blue Bubble in third and fourth year

Certifications