Skip to main content

About

Computer Engineer with one year of practical software development experience inside a university Digital Transformation Coordination Office. I work across backend and frontend development, Retrieval-Augmented Generation chatbot systems, application portals, dashboards, web crawling, REST APIs, security hardening, and Odoo-based web applications.

I have contributed to locally hosted AI solutions including a university RAG chatbot, a student application management portal, and an Odoo 18 website auto-translation platform powered by local AI models.

Yaaqob Alfakih, wearing round glasses and a white shirt, photographed outdoors on a balcony.
based
Dammam, Saudi Arabia
role
AI & Backend Software Engineer
focus
RAG · Backend · Local AI

Open to software engineering roles and selected freelance projects.

Download CV

How I got here

I studied Computer Engineering at OSTİM Technical University in Ankara, graduating in January 2026. Alongside the final part of the degree I spent a year inside the university’s Digital Transformation Coordination Office — the team that builds and maintains the institution’s own software.

That year is where most of what I know came from. I worked on three systems that real people depend on: a Retrieval-Augmented Generation chatbot answering questions from university sources, a student application management platform used by applicants and internal reviewers, and an automatic translation system for the university’s Odoo 18 website running on locally hosted models. The work spanned crawling and retrieval, caching and session handling, reviewer interfaces and reporting dashboards, prompt design and job platforms, and the security controls that any public endpoint needs.

It also taught me how software gets built by a team rather than by one person: sprint cycles, collaborative code review, CMMI-aligned documentation and testing standards, and the discipline of leaving a system someone else can pick up.

I am now based in Dammam, Saudi Arabia, looking for software engineering roles in backend and AI application work, and taking on selected freelance projects in the same areas.

How I work

  • Understand the system before changing it

    Most of my first months on any codebase were spent reading it. Working inside an established team taught me that the expensive mistakes come from changing code you have not understood yet.

  • Security and validation are part of the feature

    On a public endpoint, input handling is not a hardening pass you schedule later. Validation, sanitisation and rate limiting were built into the request path of the systems I worked on, not added to them.

  • Write it down

    Structured documentation was part of how the office worked, and it is a habit I kept. A system nobody else can operate or extend is unfinished, however well it runs.

  • Ship inside the team’s process

    Sprint planning, task management, collaborative code review, testing, deployment. Working to a defined process is not overhead — it is what makes several people’s work add up to one system.

Education

  • Bachelor of Science in Computer Engineering

    OSTİM Technical University

    Ankara, Türkiye

    Graduated January 2026

Languages

Arabic
Native or bilingual proficiency
English
Professional working proficiency

Let’s discuss your project

Have a software, AI, RAG, or web application project in mind? Let’s discuss what you need and determine the right technical approach.