Hello, and welcome
I'm Muhammad Siddiqui, though most people call me Faiz. I'm a senior software engineer with six years of building production services on Spring/Kotlin, .NET and AWS. Along the way I've built large-scale document infrastructure, complex tax handling systems, AI-driven classification pipelines, and payment-integrated mobile products.
Before all of that I co-founded a company and shipped a mobile dine-in ordering platform. These days I also contribute to Finamp, an open-source Jellyfin music client with over 50,000 downloads on Google Play. I'm the one who built its Instant Mix feature.
My current side project is EncloseHorse, which pairs an exact CP-SAT solver with a U-Net to play a daily puzzle game, and measures how far the learned prior actually transfers.
What's new
| Date | Item |
|---|---|
| Aug 2026 | Published EncloseHorse, a CP-SAT solver teaching a U-Net to play a puzzle game. The rules validate 232/232 against the game's own published optima, and the learned prior comes out 4.9x ahead of a fixed heuristic in-distribution. New |
| 2026 | My digital signature capture prototype won LegalZoom's company hackathon. It shipped to a pilot set of counties and is now expanding nationally. |
| May 2025 | Graduated from The University of Texas at Austin with an M.S. in Computer Science, completed while working full-time. |
| Jun 2022 | My third Instant Mix pull request was merged into Finamp. The feature now ships to every user of the app. Read the whole story » |
| Jan 2022 | Joined LegalZoom as a Senior Software Engineer. |
Quick facts
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Currently | Senior Software Engineer at LegalZoom (since January 2022) |
| Experience | 6 years, across enterprise backend, mobile and startups |
| Languages | Kotlin, Java, Python, C#, Swift, JavaScript, PHP, C/C++, SQL |
| Backend | Spring Boot, .NET, Flask, Symfony, Ruby on Rails, REST API design |
| Cloud | AWS: Lambda, API Gateway, DynamoDB, S3, EC2, SNS/SQS, Cognito, IoT Core |
| Mobile | iOS, Android, React Native, Flutter |
| Education | M.S. CS, UT Austin (2025) · B.S. CS, UT Arlington, Magna Cum Laude (2020) |
| Open source | Finamp: 4 merged pull requests, including the Instant Mix feature. EncloseHorse: a CP-SAT and PyTorch game-playing agent (MIT) |
| AI / ML | RAG pipelines, agentic workflows, LLM document classification. CP-SAT, PyTorch, imitation learning and PPO on side projects |
The greatest hits
If you only read a few things on this site, make it these:
- EncloseHorse, where I trained a neural net to play a puzzle game, validated the rules 232/232 against the real thing, and measured exactly where the learned prior stops transferring.
- The Instant Mix feature in Finamp, on how I shipped a feature to 50,000+ people through three pull requests to a 4,200-star open-source project, plus what the maintainer and real users said about it.
- Three months down to one week, the digital signature capture product that won a company hackathon and then actually launched.
Take a look around, and drop me a line before you go. If you'd rather email me directly, I'm at fsiddiqui.fgs@gmail.com.