Azeezah is one of the strongest engineers in the team leading the business critical efforts related to RCF such as automation & map update & Canada launch. She typically owns and delivers projects which require a good understanding of the details of routing components such as RoutingEngine, speed profiles, artifact update workflows, etc. She's eager to quickly try to build prototypes for projects which we all speculate can have a huge impact. She asks great questions in spec review meetings, always questions roadmap prioritization, and raises her concern if she has any.
At the beginning of 2022 daily map updates seemed impossible due to the lack of automation and evaluation. Azeezah collaborated with cross-team & cross-functional & cross-timezone stakeholders, she created an execution plan and built a sound system running every day for every map version. She also brought up a plan to optimize the workflow and reduced execution time to fit in a tight time window for daily map updates.
Azeezah is extremely fast and productive - she will frequently respond to and fix smaller issues in a matter of hours, which has helped unblock some critical use-cases (e.g. map updates). This quick responsiveness also makes her an effective operator of the team's systems, especially during operational issues. As the domain expert on some of the team's workflows (especially related to RCF and map updates), Azeezah has been very proactive about designing them to be flexible and easy to use, while also being resilient to failures, which has been very important in the success of the automated map updates work-stream. I also appreciate Azeezah's eagerness in solving problems, often coming up with interesting and novel solutions for future projects.
Azeezah is an exceptional engineer with a broad skill set and a deep commitment to her work. In my experience working with her, she consistently demonstrated an unwavering commitment to excellence and a genuine eagerness to learn and grow. Her approachable and collaborative demeanor made her an ideal team member, and her ability to ask insightful questions helped drive discussions forward and get to the heart of complex issues. Azeezah's key strengths are "all-in ownership" and "dive deep". During her time on the RCF project in 2022, Azeezah quickly adapted to the complex domain and worked tirelessly to improve and maintain the stack. She developed new workflows, revised SQL queries as needed, and added new functionalities to ensure the project's success.
In another project, she collaborated with DS to analyze RCF for Canada launch, running a series of complex analyses to evaluate our ETA and Routing stack. Her quality work and dedication were evident in the impressive results.
All-in Ownership - Azeezah took initiative during her work on the RCF Canada Launch Plan. This involved communicating with up-stream data partners, brainstorming solutions to a novel problem, and verifying legality of ideas. Azeezah owned many parts of this project by leading discussions with down/upstream teams, communicating progress to team, and sharing issues with teams to promote alignment. Azeezah's ability to reach out to others, when needed, greatly sped up ours and other's work
Build great teams - As a new data scientist on the Routing team, I did not always have context for what the SWEs on routing were working on or debates that came up. Azeezah has been my main point of contact when I have questions and is always enthusiastic about answering my questions and sharing this context that I may be missing, as well as including me in meetings, activities, or slack channels. She has represented the engineering team well and empowered me to work efficiently on x-functional projects.
I have interacted with Azeezah while working on the faster map updates program for a very long time. I found Azeezah to be very knowledgeable of the complex routing stack. She took complete ownership and played a critical role in achieving partially and fully automated map releases. She even went beyond by suggesting further improvements to the process - a kill-switch for pausing the map update. this will reduce human involvement thereby saving engineering hours.During map releases, Azeezah is always available for proactively looking into the metrics and debugging them, reaching out to the right folks. I can always rely on her to make decisions on the map release. I also found Azeezah to be very involved during team meetings and architectural discussions. I found her asking the right questions to the MapXP team in understanding how and why the system behaves in a particular way.
Since joining Routing, Azeezah has exemplified all in ownership on RE map updates, in addition to the key role she plays in offline exp creation and execution (PRS). She presented a detailed, comprehensive, and clear spec that was eventually approved by the entire team. She took into consideration team-level initiatives like the broader map update automation, and was careful to get cross-team buy-in, soliciting feedback on what was best to build.
She has a unique ability to learn and build clear mental models of complex systems very quickly. She always contributes to conversations and dives deep into areas she doesn't understand well. This is a key characteristic for anyone working within the Routing stack, since so many of the components are so linearly connected. RE is the most upstream component of this serving stack, so its uniquely difficult to handle. She's represented the RE team in tech discussions across Routing and clearly explained trade-offs associated with RE interactions.
Azeezah delivered multiple projects on RCF, taking over a component poorly understood and poorly tested from a departing senior engineer, turning a set of 12 disconnected wfs into an automated pipeline integrated with our systems. She also helped represent the workstream while Sobhan was out (5mo), even helping onboard MUC SWEs who were more senior than her. She identified gaps in the profile name, profile concurrency, RCF reproducibility, debuggability, build time due to Canada tables, driving the resolutions of them herself. She's an active participant in discussions around RCF quality, implementing solutions for service and link roads. She went deep into the RCF map update fix, working with Traffic so the fix was understood and wouldn't happen again. She is an active participant in reviews, even identifying a big gap in the complex Dijkstra preemption. She worked closely with Traffic so the TSP system would work perfectly with RCF. Our team would've failed if we did not have Azeezah.