uzair vawda · portfolio

Uzair Vawda.

Engineer. MBA candidate. NYC.

Portrait of Uzair Vawda

01 · About

I build things, then figure out what they're worth.

JHParking started out of sheer frustration. During COVID more people on my block bought cars while the number of street spots stayed exactly where it was, and the choice became parking up to a mile from home or circling the same blocks for up to an hour at peak times. What it does today is let a friends group share where they parked and when they are leaving; the paid marketplace is where it is going. I had taken a run at this years ago as ParkForLess and put it down; the idea kept looking right, so I picked it back up. MatAI and CoachMe both came out of the jiu jitsu gym.

By day I'm a software engineer at Collins Aerospace. Most of my time there has gone into a design system, which exists because so much of UI development is building the same generic components over and over, each one re-themed and restyled in company colors. A handful of teams now build on it, and — more recently — an AI agent writes components against it. That second part has changed how I work more than anything else in the last few years.

Evenings are an MBA at Baruch's Zicklin School, concentrating in AI and product development. The point isn't to stop engineering. It's to be the person who can write the business case and then go build the thing it argues for.

I'm in NYC. If you want the long version, my CV has it — otherwise, keep scrolling.

02 · Experience

Five-plus years across aerospace, finance, and legal tech.

Nov 2022 — Present06

Software Engineer

·Collins Aerospace

Design systems, AI tooling, and platform work for aerospace engineering teams.

  • Built and shipped an internal React and TypeScript design system — 50+ accessible, themeable components on Figma's Simple Design System, published to the internal npm registry with Storybook, a live component dashboard, and a documented release pipeline. Open to every developer in the org and adopted by 5+ projects. Worked with design to integrate the package into Figma itself, so a design emits code snippets built from its components and developers copy and paste the UI — there are always tweaks to make, but where a component drops in untouched, mostly the non-interactive ones, it cuts the time to build a screen by up to 90%.
  • Built Poolside, an in-house AI agent that learns the design system's patterns and generates components on demand — cutting component creation time by up to 80% and retiring the paid tooling we had been leaning on. Five custom, project-specific components have shipped through it, and it is rolling out to new teams.
  • Built Skyler, an Angular configuration interface for a radar sensor platform: live telemetry visualizations — array tilt, azimuth compass, pitch and roll attitude indicators, MapLibre GL mapping — plus full scan-mission management across STARE, PPI, RHI, and raster patterns.
  • Led a platform-wide TypeScript migration and the move to modern CSS with Tailwind, improving maintainability and developer experience.
  • Owned end-to-end platform work — performance, testing infrastructure, observability, and CI/CD — alongside React and GraphQL application development.
Mar 2022 — Oct 202205

Infrastructure Project Manager · Leadership Development Program

·Collins Aerospace

Ran infrastructure delivery across business units during the second rotation.

  • Managed a portfolio of 6 infrastructure projects across lifecycle stages, delivering 2 to completion while balancing competing stakeholders.
  • Introduced Scrum practices that lifted team velocity and cross-functional collaboration.
  • Standardized company-wide PM artifacts — project charter, RACI matrix — that were adopted well beyond my own team.
Jul 2021 — Feb 202204

Applications Licensing Specialist · Leadership Development Program

·Collins Aerospace

Owned enterprise application licensing during the first rotation.

  • Drove a software license rationalization that cut license count 18% year over year.
  • Consolidated 75+ applications across 6 servers, reducing redundancy and improving accessibility.
  • Built a React and Python license-tracking tool giving stakeholders real-time visibility into server status.
Apr 2020 — Oct 202003

Front-End Experience Developer

·J.P. Morgan Chase & Co.

Shared front-end components for the firm's public-facing experiences.

Drexel co-op
  • Built reusable JavaScript and HTML5 components deployed across multiple sites, establishing shared front-end patterns.
  • Delivered responsive, maintainable code against stakeholder requirements, using BitBucket and SonarQube for version control and code quality.
Apr 2019 — Oct 201902

IT Applications Developer

·Dechert LLP

Reporting automation and analytics for internal legal teams.

Drexel co-op
  • Automated reporting and ETL workflows in SQL and Python for internal clients.
  • Built Tableau dashboards surfacing application usage, performance, and adoption patterns.
2017 — 202101

Finance Coordinator · Muslim Interscholastic Tournament

·MIST

Budget ownership and live event production across four tournament cycles.

  • Owned the tournament budget across four cycles, managing spend against sponsorship revenue and growing the budget 5–20% year over year.
  • Secured and managed corporate sponsors including PwC — owning outreach, deliverables, and the relationship.
  • Ran live interscholastic competitions end to end: run-of-show, speaker and judge coordination, venue and vendor management, volunteer staffing, and day-of execution across concurrent tracks.

03 · Projects

Everything I'm building, at whatever stage it's at.

JHParking

Founder · Full-Stack · Jun 2025 — Present

Piloting · 7 beta users
Site

It started on my own block during COVID, when more neighbors bought cars and the number of street spots did not move. What exists today is the sharing layer: you post where you parked and when you are leaving to a friends group, and an integrated chat lets little neighborhood communities form around it. That is what the seven beta users are on. Where it is heading is the paid peer-to-peer marketplace — people with a driveway or an empty spot list it, drivers book and pay by the hour — and Stripe is wired in for that layer. React and Tailwind on the front, Firestore running the live layer. It is deliberately scoped as a focused local solution rather than an everywhere-app. This is the second run at the idea — the first was ParkForLess, which I shelved and came back to because I still thought it was right.

  • React
  • TailwindCSS
  • Stripe
  • Firestore

Want in? I would happily talk to anyone who has built a two-sided marketplace — especially about cold-starting the supply side.

MatAI

Founder · Product & Engineering · Jul 2026 — Present

In development

A passion project that came from two directions at once: I hit a point where reviewing my own film stopped being useful without help, and it is also just an interesting piece of software to build. It is an AI system that watches jiu jitsu footage and hands back a timestamped map of the match: what position you were in and when, where submissions were attempted, and what to work on. The hard part is that conventional tracking falls apart here — in grappling two athletes overlap almost completely and trackers permanently swap their identities. So instead of tracking two bodies, it classifies the position they are in together. Closed guard describes a relationship, not a person. Roles bind to athletes through appearance descriptors captured once, up front, and scramble and unclear are first-class labels so the model can decline to guess rather than confabulate.

  • Python
  • FastAPI
  • ffmpeg
  • Claude API
  • SQLite

Want in? I would love to hear from anyone working on video understanding or evaluation design — and from anyone willing to let me test against their footage.

CoachMe

Founder · Product & Technical Design · In development

Design stage · 5 coaches committed

Some of the best black belts in the world have no platform to teach from, and no straightforward way to earn from what they know. That came up in conversations at the gym, and I kept landing on the same gap on my own. CoachMe is an attempt at one: a marketplace where competitive jiu jitsu athletes buy video review from independently verified high-level coaches, with feedback anchored to the footage itself — notes pinned to exact timestamps, voiceover recorded against the timeline, drawings on paused frames. The money layer runs on Stripe Connect using separate charges and transfers rather than destination charges, specifically so funds can sit in escrow between purchase and acceptance; destination charges settle immediately and leave nothing to hold, which would make the delivery guarantee unenforceable. Five coaches are committed. No athletes yet — that is the next problem.

  • Next.js
  • Expo
  • Postgres
  • Stripe Connect
  • Mux
  • Inngest

Want in? Looking for athletes to test with, and for anyone who has run trust-and-safety or dispute flows on a marketplace.

Earlier concepts

PageKeeper

Concept · full PRD

A reading-habit app — streaks, goals, gentle friend accountability, a reading journal. Specced end to end, including the security and compliance architecture and an intentionally un-manipulative monetization model.

  • React Native
  • Firebase

MBA-Engineered

Ongoing

One small consulting tool per MBA class — an IT maturity assessment, a market-sizing dashboard, a Porter's Five Forces analyzer, an Ask My MBA retrieval app. The premise is that advising on a deliverable and building it should not be different people.

  • Next.js
  • RAG

Connect.

Concept · prototype

An all-in-one platform pairing companies with influencers to optimize reach. Early product and business framing, built as a Vue prototype.

  • Vue

04 · Archive

Everything before that.

Coursework, prototypes, and things I built to find out whether I could. Most of them taught me something that showed up later.

05 · Skills

What I bring to the table.

Engineering & Platform

  • TypeScript
  • JavaScript
  • Python
  • C#
  • SQL
  • React
  • Next.js
  • Vue
  • Angular
  • Node
  • Express
  • GraphQL
  • Design systems
  • PostgreSQL
  • Firebase
  • MongoDB
  • Stripe
  • CI/CD

AI & Data

  • AI-assisted development
  • Agentic workflows
  • LLMs
  • Vision-language models
  • Prompt engineering
  • Evaluation & benchmarking
  • RAG
  • Tableau
  • Data visualization

Product Management

  • Roadmapping
  • PRD authoring
  • MVP scoping
  • User research
  • Marketplace monetization
  • Unit economics
  • Trust & safety
  • KPIs & A/B testing
  • Agile / Scrum

Strategy & Advisory

  • Technology & product strategy
  • Business case development
  • Cost optimization
  • Market & competitive analysis
  • Go-to-market
  • Change management
  • Stakeholder management

06 · Education & Certifications

Formal training, in progress.

Schools

Baruch College · Zicklin School of Business

Master of Business Administration

Concentrating in Artificial Intelligence & Product Development · expected June 2028

Drexel University · College of Computing and Informatics

B.S. Software Engineering

3.5 GPA · co-op program · 2021

Certifications

Project Management Institute

Project Management Professional (PMP)

Expected Dec 2026

Scrum Alliance

Certified Scrum Product Owner

2022

Scrum Alliance

Certified Scrum Master

2022

Udemy

100 Days of Front-End Development

2022

07 · Off-screen

What I'm doing when I'm not at the keyboard.

Jiu jitsu

Three years in, a blue belt under Ryan Quinn out of Queens Jiu Jitsu, and a semi-active competitor. I play guard, which is not typical for a big man, and most of what I enjoy is cross-training and learning new moves. What keeps me coming back is the detailed yet aggressive nature of it.

Photography

Cameras taught me composition long before code did — what to leave out, mostly.

Coffee

Pour-overs at home, espresso when I'm out, opinions either way.

Traveling

Notes from new cities have a habit of turning into side projects a few months later.

08 · Let's talk

Any of this sound interesting?

Every project up there is open. If you want to write code on one, poke holes in the idea, test an early build, or just talk it through over coffee — I'd genuinely like to hear from you.

Recruiting, collaboration, or a plain hello all land in the same inbox, and I read every message.

Optional — e.g. recruiter, founder, classmate

Optional — what's prompting the reach-out

09 · What's next

Building a portfolio of consulting tools, one per MBA class.

The MBA section is a separate, evolving project — shippable tools tied to each class, written up as case studies.

Visit MBA section