~ % cat ./about

About

Senior Engineering Manager and AI practitioner in Berlin. I lead engineering teams at Staffbase, ship side projects, and write about agentic engineering.

Khaled Garbaya - Engineering Leader, Developer and Educator

~ % git log --reverse

It started with PRINT Khaled

I’m Khaled Garbaya, born and raised in a small town in the south of Tunisia. The first program I ever wrote was typed into GBasic on an Atari keyboard console with a cartridge slot. My name showed up on the screen and that settled it. I went looking for loops next and never really stopped.

Macromedia Flash is what made it serious. It amazed me that a thing I built would just work in every browser, back when JavaScript was mostly used to show an alert. I studied computer science at a university 20 km from home, built Flash sites for businesses and non-profits in my hometown, and took that portfolio straight into a Flash developer job at an agency in Tunis. Then Flash died — security problems, and Steve Jobs’s open letter as the final straw. It had paid my bills for years and taught me more JavaScript than I noticed at the time.

JavaScript, then Node, then Berlin. Full-stack work, open source (Yargs, Gatsby), some videos and writing along the way. After more than a decade of coding I moved into management — not because it’s “the next natural step,” but because I like helping people succeed and seeing them get there. The move meant relearning about people everything I had learned about code.

gbasic — atari
> PRINT Khaled
KHALED
> REM and that settled it
READY.

~ % git log --oneline career/

The career arc

  1. 2016 — 2021

    Contentful

    IC, then Engineering Manager

    Built the JS SDK ecosystem, shipped Environment Aliases, and led the team that delivered Compose & Launch — enterprise content workflow tools. Mentored three engineers into management.

    0%
    team retention

  2. 2021 — 2023

    Gatsby

    Engineering Manager

    Primary technical driver for Gatsby v5, coordinating directly with React engineers at Meta.

    0%
    build time reduction
    0%
    less JavaScript shipped

  3. 2023 — 2024

    Uniform

    Head of Engineering Management

    Led cross-functional squads and architected a multi-data-source visual editor.

    0%
    infrastructure cost reduction

  4. 2024 — 2025

    Independent

    Deliberate break

    Went deep on AI. Built skscan (an AI agent security scanner), a visual agent builder, and a burnout detection app. Tested products against real users. Came back sharper.

    0
    AI products built from scratch

  5. 2025 — now

    Staffbase

    Senior Engineering Manager

    Engineering teams on the employee communications platform, plus AI leadership across the org: agentic development practices, AI competencies in the career ladder, and rebuilding plugin infrastructure for the AI era.

The independent year was the best investment I’ve made in my career.
I stopped managing and started building again — AI products from scratch, with real constraints and no safety net. It clarified what I want to do next.

~ % ps aux | grep now

Where I am now

I manage agents the way I manage engineers: specs, plans, reviews, phase gates.

I’m a daily practitioner of AI-assisted engineering. I use Claude Code for most of my coding work, run multi-agent systems, and think seriously about harness engineering — the discipline of designing the environment that makes agents reliable over time, not just impressive in a demo.

Most writing about AI engineering assumes a solo expert. My actual interest is the harder problem: what happens when a team at different skill levels runs agents against the same codebase at the same time? That’s what I’m working on and writing about.

I still write code every day. I think that matters.

~ % ls ~/side-projects

Always building

Building is how I think. I always have something running.

  • closing in on launch

    MoodPulse

    Slack-integrated burnout detection via communication patterns.

    TanStack Start · Cloudflare Workers · D1 · Stripe

  • in progress

    TileViz

    3D tile visualizer for home renovation — and the reason this site has opinions about cameras.

    Three.js · TanStack Start · Cloudflare Workers

  • experiment

    Mastra Builder

    Visual IDE for composing AI agent workflows.

    Mastra · TypeScript

~ % man khaled

Management style

I’m a background operator. I find and create opportunities for my people without making it about me. I care most about giving engineers the space, context, and stretch assignments to grow into their potential. I remove blockers, set direction, then get out of the way.

When I step in, it’s hands-on: I prototype, I pair, I ship alongside the team.

~ % logout

Outside work

Family man first. Raising a child has become my new hobby, and I try hard to protect time with the people I love — work will never end, but that time will.

Arabic is my native language. I work in English and French, and I’m getting there with German.

I lift, play video games to reset, and take a good steak seriously.

~ % logout · Connection to about closed.