Fahim Farook

Career, approach, open source, education.

I’ve spent the last years building enterprise platforms, primarily in telecommunications - from engineer at Virtusa serving British Telecom Openreach, through progressively senior roles, to CTO at Arimac Digital where I led delivery for clients like du, Ooredoo, and Vodafone across Europe, MENA, South Asia, and the Pacific.

What I Do

The work I enjoy most sits at the intersection of systems thinking and hands-on engineering - designing architectures that work at scale, and being willing to go as deep as the problem demands when they don’t. I’ve traced production issues from TCP packet captures through load balancer logs, reactive thread models, JVM heap dumps, and database query execution plans. I believe the best technical leaders stay close to the systems they design.

Convictions

I favor volatility-based decomposition over domain-driven design as the primary driver of system structure.

• Most enterprise systems fail not because of technology choices, but because of decomposition choices - cutting along the wrong boundaries.

I’ve diagnosed Infinispan split-brain conditions and traced cascading failures from TCP packet captures to JVM heap dumps, and beyond.

• I stay close to the systems I design - especially when they’re under load and the abstractions start to break.

• Legacy technologies are still good. XML and XSLT are still excellent - I choose technologies based on the problem, regardless of what’s fashionable.

I deliberately chose Docker on VMs over Kubernetes for one Pacific operator because their team wasn’t ready for K8s. The architecture that ships and stays up beats the architecture that’s theoretically elegant.

• I think from first principles. If a popular pattern doesn’t hold up under scrutiny for a specific context, I don’t use it - regardless of how widely adopted it is.

Current Roles

Defining the technical vision, governance, and architecture for telecom platforms and products.

A research and product studio exploring distributed systems, novel programming languages, and enterprise integration.

Past Career

CTO of a 250+ person technology company. Led enterprise architecture, engineering governance, technology strategy, and technical delivery across 20+ client engagements in telecom, aviation, retail, and government sectors. Engagements ranged from $1B digital transformation programs to greenfield platform builds for operators serving millions of subscribers. Restructured engineering from siloed departments into cross-functional delivery pods. Established architecture governance, engineering policy frameworks, and technology strategy.

9+ years at Virtusa Corporation (Nasdaq: VRTU), primarily serving British Telecom Openreach as Software Architect for 7+ years - across order orchestration, network inventory, security operations, and digital transformation. Led 20+ member engineering teams.

Open Source

I contribute to the projects I use.

• Spring Cloud Netflix (Hystrix, Eureka) - Contributed PRs addressing distributed platform requirements for British Telecom Openreach. GitHub
• Spring Boot - Contributed to make map-property-sources refreshable on Spring Cloud environments. GitHub
• Jasypt Spring Boot - Introduced Jasypt encryption integration for Spring Cloud. GitHub
• Debezium - Contributed a fix to the CDC platform's error handling framework. GitHub
• FSM4JS (Creator) - A declarative Finite State Machine library in JavaScript with stateful states, programmatic transitions, and transition hooks. GitHub
• Hikma (Creator) - A CLI tool for structured knowledge and dotfile management with Zettelkasten-style note linking, PARA-based digital asset organization, template system, and Git integration. GitHub

Education

BSc Information Technology - Curtin University, Australia (2008–2011)
CGPA 3.79 / 4.0

Selected Recognition

• Top Talent at Virtusa Corporation - continuously rated Outstanding/Exceeds Expectations (2012–2020)
• BT Awards for engineering efficiency, innovation, on-time delivery, and teamwork (2019)
• Mentor Award for significant positive impact on mentees’ career growth (2016)
• Merit-based scholarships for superior academic performance at Curtin University (2008–2010)