About

photo of muhammad arief rahman

Hello, my name is Muhammad Arief Rahman, but you can call me Arief. I'm a generalist software engineer with more than 6 years of experiences based in Jakarta, Indonesia. I have a proven track record of driving impactful results, contributing to several companies in different sectors including fintech, academia, government and one of the biggest online marketplace in Indonesia, Bukalapak.

I love solving problem, in fact it might be my passion. Not only solving technical difficulties but I'd love to deep dive into fundamental reason of why the problem exists in the first place, talking to domain expert, business owner and asses the technical solutions into current system, with this approach I've successfully create a positive impact within every companies and project that I've working on.

The reason I created this website is to share my journey as a software engineer and offer my perspective. As the old saying goes, "If you would not be forgotten as soon as you're dead, either write something worth reading or do something worth writing."

Story behind Insomnius

The story began during my college years, when I had to grind day and night to learn programming languages and understand the basic concepts of programming. Those were not easy years, as I came from a vocational high school in accounting and hadn’t learned complex math like others. During this period, I realized that to succeed, I would have to work even harder than others. Coming from a developing country and starting life with challenges, I coined the term insomnius and adopted the mottosleep well is my dream—because I believe I won’t truly sleep well until I succeed in life and find peace.

Tech Stack

I'm adaptable to any tech stack and approach problems from first principles, but here are my favorites that I want to highlight.

Ruby's logoRuby on rails logoGo 's logoJavascript's logoReact JS's logoDocker's logoPostgres's logo

Get in touch

You can reach out to me using the link below. Don't hesitate to get in touch—I don't bite!

Experiences

Learn about the journey I've been on and the moments that have helped me grow.

2024

Senior Software Development Engineer, Backend - Lecturer Career Platform

July 2023 - Now

Remote, Indonesia

  • Created the first-ever centralized career platform for approximately 500,000 lecturers across Indonesia. Led a team of 5 backend engineers to integrate lecturer portfolios into the State Civil Service system using PHP and Laravel, achieving about 80% unit test coverage for all APIs. Combined this with ReactJS to enhance development workflow and application reactivity, aiding around 100,000 lecturers in integrating their credit scores for promotions.
  • Led the initiative to develop a lecturer promotions platform according to new regulations. Designed the technical architecture, made key technical decisions, communicated with stakeholders, reviewed code implementations, and contributed to the entire development lifecycle despite strict deadlines and evolving requirements, supporting approximately 5,000 lecturers in submitting their promotions.
  • Fostered a user-oriented programming culture by introducing unit test capabilities to a legacy repository, transitioning from MVC to API-based architecture with React, and implementing contract-based API development. Embraced test-driven development and RFC (Request for Comments) culture, resulting in clearer development processes and more predictable applications.

php

google cloud platform

postgresql

redis

laravel

golang

2023

Senior Software Development Engineer, Backend - Account & Management Platform

February 2023 - July 2023 / 6 months

Remote, Indonesia

  • Led the integration between state data and Google Workspace API, supporting online learning for around 3 million teachers and 50 million students in 400,000 schools, one of the world's largest educational networks.
  • Reduced failures by using Redis to implement an outgoing rate limit. Fixed major issues, including a persistent loop bug, cutting integration time from 7 days to just 4 hours.
  • Used OpenTelemetry and Google Cloud Trace for comprehensive tracking, and added new Grafana metrics to monitor and alert on critical features, leading to quicker bug detection and easier error tracking.
  • Improved the deployment process with better communication and acknowledgment. Enforced unit tests in code reviews, increasing unit test coverage by 18% in a 225,000-line code repository.

golang

google cloud platform

postgresql

redis

Joined Govtech Edu

February

Inspired by Govtech Edu's mission, I am motivated to join the company and contribute to advancing education in Indonesia.

2022

Technical Lead - Trust & Fraud Platform

January 2022 - January 2023 / 1 year

Remote, Indonesia

  • Maintaining Bukalapak fraud detection system. Collaborating with product and stakeholder to govern the integration progress of a new fraud rule and actions.
  • Manage technical debt to reduce operating and maintenance costs, improve poorly designed architecture and eliminate technical difficulty in some area. Resulting in more than 3 million rupiah cost saving per day.
  • Expanding expertise in test engineer area, including API automation, test cases creation and end to end testing capability resulting in higher quality software with low defect.
  • Drive and participate in the implementation of KYC on Bukalapak's subsidiary including but not limited to foreign products to support small and medium business.
  • Developing centralized fraud dashboard to improve Bukalapak's trust and safety team operational effectiveness.
  • Work closely with product manager and stakeholders to solve business problem and decide the best technical solution.
  • Work closely with AI team to create bad product detection with OCR and image similarity.

golang

ruby on rails

mysql

google cloud platform

postgresql

bigquery

kubernetes

kafka

ETL

event-driven

docker

apache flink

2021

Senior Software Engineer Backend - Core Communication and Trust

September 2021 - December 2021 / 4 months

Remote, Indonesia

  • Participate in maintaining communication platforms including chat and notification services that handle millions of requests per day.
  • Spearheaded the development of a KYC enforcement feature utilizing big query and Ruby, resulting in a daily reduction of approximately 10% in refund rates.
  • Migrating sms provider to use verihubs that results in 15% cost saving.
  • Collaborating with data scientists, stakeholders and product managers to improve our current algorithms to protect the marketplace ecosystem from bad quality sellers and bad quality products including creating new regulations for medicinal products, creating new processes to hide bad quality sellers and improved current algorithm to reduce the number of false positives in its detection.

golang

ruby on rails

mysql

google cloud platform

postgresql

bigquery

kubernetes

kafka

ETL

event-driven

docker

ci/cd

Engineer Squad Lead - Merchant Post Transaction

June 2021 - September 2021 / 4 months

Remote, Indonesia

  • Drive event‑driven architecture in seller platform initiatives. Provided an example proof of concept using Kafka, and created a basic architecture that will be used in future projects
  • Manage the collaborative contribution of twelve engineers in creating a new transaction platform for the sales channel, including roadmap planning, synchronization between teams and functions, and deliver quality products rapidly
  • Collaborating with product managers in improving the transaction flow of Bukalapak and reducing the number of limbo transactions by implementing auto remittance based on criteria researched by data scientists.

golang

ruby on rails

mysql

google cloud platform

postgresql

bigquery

kubernetes

kafka

ETL

event-driven

docker

ci/cd

2020

Engineer Squad Lead - Merchant Transaction and Quality

September 2019 - June 2021 / 1 year 10 months

Jakarta, Indonesia

  • Maintain the flow of seller transactions at Bukalapak, including accepting, delivering, refunding and remitting transactions. Create precise monitoring, logging and alerts using kibana, datadog and opsgenie. Set up a reliable system that handles ~ 6 million remittance transactions per day.
  • Collaborate with data scientists to create a phishing prevention and detection system, which is implemented with bigquery and golang, works with millions of data and ensures process reliability, saving millions of cash every day.
  • Develop a seller quality automation system, which evaluates sellers by several business rules to keep them on track to provide the best service to buyers. Reduce refund rate and increase buyer satisfaction.
  • Lead a number of engineers, conduct daily code reviews, create technology documents for microservices and features, make technical decisions, communicate product requirements with current technology capabilities, ensure all teammates apply engineering best practices, conduct 1 on 1 sessions, work directly below engineering managers.

golang

ruby on rails

mysql

google cloud platform

postgresql

bigquery

kubernetes

kafka

ETL

event-driven

docker

ci/cd

2019

Software Engineer Backend - Policy and Seller Quality

September 2018 - September 2019 / 1 year

Jakarta, Indonesia

  • Maintain a policy detection system to keep Bukalapak market safe from products that are banned by the government such as illegal drugs, alcohol, endangered animals, and other provisions. Provides policy operations teams with dashboards and other features that make their job easier. Ban one million products every week with our automation system.
  • Collaborating with data scientists to create a seller scoring system which is widely used at Bukalapak and in particular the super seller feature which is one of the largest revenue earners at Bukalapak.

golang

ruby on rails

mysql

rabbitmq

mongo

kubernetes

docker

kafka

ETL

event-driven

redash

apache hadoop

hdfs

apache hudi

apache presto

ci/cd

2018

Software Engineer Backend - Transaction Safety

June 2018 - September 2018 / 4 months

Jakarta, Indonesia

  • Maintaining Bukalapak legacy fraud detection system, create a fraud tracker for all game voucher transactions in Bukalapak which can further be used by data analysts to create a fraud rule.
  • Collaborating with data scientists to create bot detection in user registrations that prevent rogue users and suspicious users from abusing our referral system at Bukalapak, saving millions in cash.

golang

ruby on rails

mysql

rabbitmq

mongo

kubernetes

kafka

ETL

event-driven

redash

ci/cd

Joined Bukalapak

June

Jakarta, Indonesia

Inspired by Bukalapak’s commitment to nurturing and investing in local talent—a rare approach at the time—I was motivated to join and contribute to this vision.

2017

Graduated from my College, with a GPA of 3.46

September, since 2013 / 4 years

Jakarta, Indonesia

Inspired by advancements in AI, I developed a sentiment analysis thesis using opinion mining methodology and a Naive Bayes classifier, achieving an average accuracy of 86%.

Web Developer

June 2016 - June 2017 / 1 year

Jakarta, Indonesia

  • Build a collection management system, monitoring thousands of debt-collectors doing their work, including: online attendance check with desired office location, managing how much workers can carry an amount of money, creating a dashboard to monitor and create reports based on their performance. Win several tender because of our user friendly application and performance, despite having a small team and new company.
  • Integrate to 3rd party using external API with oauth2, creating integration with google map javascript API and geolocation, dynamic menu management with secure access.
  • Introducing code repository and new workflow with git, upgrading and refactoring a whole system with laravel framework. Creating a SOP to install servers and deploy applications into Vultr. Working directly below the head of the technology, make a tech decision and contributing to their core system.

PHP

laravel

gitflow

nginx

virtual machine

JQuery

Datatabales

Highchart

Google Map API

Joined Jari .inc as a founding engineer

June

Driven by Jari's mission to build a sustainable collection ecosystem in Indonesia, I joined the company as the third software engineer on the team.

2016

Web Developer

June 2016 - September 2017 / 1 year

Jakarta, Indonesia

  • Build lecturer management system, allowing the lecturer to do online attendance checks of students, managing guidance students, have dynamic access control and e-learning integration. Works directly below the head of the campus technology division, gives direct reports and receives direct feedback.
  • Migrating and synchronizing the old lecturer management system, including database normalization, system update and use of new technology framework.

PHP

nginx

bootstrap CSS

codeigniter

oracle database server

Starting my career at Budi Luhur University

June

Our college's engineering division is launching a recruitment initiative for students to begin their professional careers by assisting in the migration of various college systems to newer technologies. I have accepted the challenge and have been assigned a direct task by the head of engineering to migrate the current lecturer system, which is written in native PHP 5, to the latest PHP 7 version and the CodeIgniter framework.