~/ak-elrawas
← All work

SustainChain

2025 – 2026

Senior Software Engineer

sustainchain.world

Context

SustainChain is a public-service platform purpose-built to unite the efforts of investors, innovators, government, and non-profits to rebuild supply chains and make real progress toward a sustainable future. Think of it as a social network for global sustainability efforts: members integrate, scale up, and find the critical resources and funding they need. I joined as a senior engineer working across the full stack of a large production application serving multiple partner organizations.

What I did

  • Led frontend development of the React/TypeScript platform, with a reusable UI architecture built on custom hooks, shared context patterns, and Material-UI.
  • Built and scaled backend services in Kotlin/Ktor: REST APIs, service layers, and PostgreSQL data models using Exposed ORM with Flyway migrations.
  • Implemented secure auth and access control with JWT, AWS Cognito, and partner capability-based permissions.
  • Delivered multi-tenant backend features for partner configuration, feature access, and workflow customization.
  • Integrated user-facing features with APIs, authentication, feature flags, analytics, and real-time services.

Key decisions

Multi-tenancy through capabilities, not forks

Partner organizations needed different feature sets and workflows. Rather than branching behavior per partner, we modeled access as capability-based permissions with partner-level configuration: one codebase, per-tenant behavior, and no divergence to maintain.

Reliability as a feature

Structured error handling, monitoring, feature flags, and environment-level safeguards were treated as first-class work, not cleanup. Combined with automated testing, static analysis, and CI/CD, this kept release quality high while shipping fast.

Outcome

Complex user-facing features shipped reliably to a large production application, with measurable improvements in frontend performance, accessibility, and delivery speed through TypeScript rigor, testing, and CI/CD practices.