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Navid Emad

Navid Emad

Lead Rails Developer.
Agentic AI Engineer.

I ship production Rails systems and build AI agents that survive contact with real infrastructure. 12 years in, still writing code every day.

✓ Open to select freelance work · Paris / remote · reply within 24 h
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Find out more ↓

Hey, I’m Navid

12 years building and running business-critical Rails apps: payments, hardware integrations, background job fleets, and real users who notice when things break.

Today I split my time between lead engineering at Yespark and wiring AI agents (Claude, MCP, GitHub automation) into production workflows, with the reliability and cost constraints a demo never faces.

I contribute to open source because it’s the best code review I know: my PRs get judged by Rails reviewers, Datadog engineers and browser-engine maintainers, not by a portfolio page.

Specialties

  • Rails at scale: queries, indexes, background job architecture
  • Agentic AI in production: Claude, MCP, skills, GitHub automation
  • Frontend that ships: Hotwire, Tailwind, server-rendered by default
  • Observability: Datadog APM & profiling, upstream contributor

How I work

  • PRs reviewers want to read: small, argued, benchmarked
  • I say no: to unprofitable AI, to features that shouldn’t exist
  • Frank by default: wrong fit? I’ll tell you on the first call

Numbers you can verify

Every number below is one click away from the raw GitHub search that produces it.

127merged open-source PRs
18public repos contributed to
2014shipping since

verify on GitHub →

Where the code landed

Lightpanda

headless browser engine in Zig · 60+ merged PRs

Web platform internals: CDP protocol events, WebAPI surface (DataTransfer, focus navigation, readystatechange), relative :has() selectors, WebSocket Origin handling, HTTP redirect edge cases.

see the merged PRs →

Rails ecosystem

rails/rails, solid_cable, jsbundling-rails, cssbundling-rails

CLI generator fixes, nil-logger support in Solid Cable, an assets:precompile build-skip option, CSS build wired into spec:prepare.

see the merged PRs →

capybara-lightpanda

author & maintainer · Ruby gem

Capybara driver to run Rails system tests on Lightpanda, the headless browser engine I contribute to. It bridges the two ecosystems above.

Datadog dd-trace-rb

APM tracer for Ruby

Two production-crash fixes merged upstream: a heap-profiling SIGSEGV on Ruby 4, and distributed-tracing header injection broken by http.rb 6.x.

see the merged PRs →

Covidliste

French COVID-19 vaccination platform · 20 merged PRs

Volunteer work during the pandemic: landing pages for health professionals, transactional email overhaul, payment status handling.

see the merged PRs →

Yespark

day job · Lead Developer

Parking rental at France scale: query and index optimization campaigns, Sidekiq fan-out architectures, ANPR camera fleet integrations, AI-assisted back-office tooling.

Case study · a Datadog-driven query & index campaign

  • 52 s → < 1 ms for the worst production query: one composite index on a 5.6 GB payments table, measured with EXPLAIN ANALYZE in prod
  • ~100 queries → 2 on an invoice listing: an ActiveStorage N+1, preloaded away
  • p95 6-16 s → < 3 s across admin & API endpoints: partial indexes, cached aggregates, and OR-of-subqueries rewritten into index-backed BitmapOr plans (conservative estimate)

How I can help

I take on a small number of freelance engagements alongside my lead role.

  • Rails performance & architectureaudits, query optimization, job pipelines
  • AI agents in productionfrom use-case audit to agents wired into your tools
  • Fractional leadtechnical direction, review culture, mentoring

Tell me what you’re building, a few short lines is enough. I reply within 24 hours, frankly: what I can do and how I’d approach it. If I’m not the right person, I’ll say so and point you elsewhere if I can.

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