Site Reliability and Platform Engineering
Systems that scale. Teams that ship.
Quais Afzali. Engineering leader in Seattle. Nearly eight years at Amazon, founder of OnQ Development, and most recently led SRE at Classmates, running reliability for 70 million members.
Built for the long run.
Sprouted from Afghanistan, raised in the U.S., settled in Seattle. I spent nearly eight years at Amazon building the GoldBox Deals and Black Friday experiences, work that helped lift domestic deal sales 60% year over year and helped stretch Black Friday from one day into a week, with global deal sales up over 300%.
In 2015 I founded OnQ Development, a Seattle studio that still ships production software for clients today. I joined Classmates in 2019 as a site reliability engineer and grew into leading SRE in 2022. Through 2026 I led a globally distributed SRE team of up to five engineers, and up to eight during the AWS migration, including three from partner teams. I co-led the move out of three data centers into AWS, cut $1.1 million (~35%) in AWS costs in six months, and took the platform from a few releases a week to dozens of deploys a day.
The throughline: I like hard operational problems, teams that own what they run, and systems nobody has to think about at 3am.
Ventures and work.
Founder and Principal Consultant, since 2015
OnQ Development
Seattle software consultancy. Software that earns its keep: custom web and mobile apps, business platforms, and managed hosting for clients who need software that holds up in production.
Site Reliability Engineering Manager, 2022 to 2026
Reliability at Classmates
Uptime for 70 million members, quiet pagers for the team: three data centers retired into AWS, $1.1M (~35%) in AWS costs cut in six months, a few releases a week turned into dozens a day, recurring incidents down 75%, and generative AI on Amazon Bedrock put to work across engineering. Twice received the Prell Award (2024, 2025), the company's highest honor for repeatable financial impact.
Software Development Engineer
The Amazon years
Nearly eight years honing engineering and leadership: owning the internal HR tools domain for four years, building the GoldBox Deals waitlist and the Black Friday experience, leading four contractors to consolidate internal platforms. Domestic deal sales up 60% year over year and over 300% globally.
Now building
BuddyUp
Turns unused guest passes and spare +1s into real-time auctions. Strangers transact safely: verified identity, escrowed payment, and money that moves only after both sides show up.
Shipped, iOS
PersonLog
An iOS app that fights relationship drift: every person you care about gets a profile, a priority, and a reminder cadence, so staying in touch stops depending on memory.
Let's talk.
Open to senior engineering leadership roles in site reliability and platform engineering, and to conversations about hard infrastructure problems.