Photo of me on my honeymoon.

My name is Sebastian Safari, I call myself a “professional fixer, hobbyist figure-outer”.

I’m a full-stack software engineer with 9+ years building production software and the infrastructure it runs on.

I love building side projects: these range from making video games, 3D printing, and programming things for myself or my family. I’ve got a few other hobbies like playing guitar, working on my car/motorcycle, and spending time with my wife and our dog.

Download my resume!

My background

I’ve been fascinated by computers from a young age, always eager to unravel their intricacies. My journey into programming began in high school, where I made a couple of video games in Java. Since then, my passion for understanding and working with computers has grown into a career as a full-stack software engineer.

I’ve progressed through various roles, starting as a SysAdmin at PARC, advancing to a Systems and Software Engineer, and now building production software at Meta. This trajectory allowed me to amass a diverse skill set spanning IT systems, infrastructure, and software development.

The job I learned the most from was PeopleDB at PARC, an internal full-stack app that became the source of truth for employee and visitor records, and provisioned accounts across Active Directory, NIS, and Microsoft 365 automatically. That’s the project where I stopped being the person who ran the systems and became the person who built the thing that ran them.

Where I am now

At Meta, I help build a single-pane-of-glass platform that centralizes software license management across many backend servers. I work on the whole stack, from the database and GraphQL schema down to the React UI.

A few things I’m proud of: I designed a version-history and one-click restore feature that cut config recovery from ~10 minutes to under 1, led the React redesign of the portal’s main home view from proof of concept to MVP, and extended the platform’s schema to unify licenses from several different managers. I still get to use my SRE roots too, diagnosing tricky production bugs and hardening our Python agent with end-to-end tests. It’s been a lot of fun!

Stuff I’ve shipped

A few side projects I took all the way to done:

  • Guac & Load is a 3D restaurant simulator with a zombie outbreak twist. I built it solo in Godot and self-published it on Steam in November 2025, taking it from prototype through store page, builds, and release.
  • Dank Nooner is a 3D open-world multiplayer motorcycle stunt game. I built a server-authoritative multiplayer prototype over WebRTC, a procedural animation system using inverse kinematics, a state-machine menu system, realistic driving physics, and a pluggable game-mode system that supports multiple mini-games. Still a work in progress.
  • Mini Macro Pad is a Go + Arduino + 3D printed macro pad. I rebuilt it from Python to Go, refactoring a monolithic GUI into an MVC architecture with a custom drag-and-drop Fyne widget for the config editor.

What I work with

  • Languages: Go, Python, JavaScript/TypeScript, Hack/PHP, Ruby, C, Bash
  • Backend & web: React, GraphQL, REST, graph entity schemas (node/edge modeling), Flask, SQLite, Nginx
  • Infrastructure: Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform, Chef, AWS, Azure, CI/CD
  • Practices: Git, Linux, testing (pytest, end-to-end), design patterns, AI-assisted development with Claude Code
  • Certifications: Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CNCF), 2025

I post related writeups on my blog!

Some of my values

  • I always try to find efficient ways to solve problems.
  • I like doing things the right way, I’m not a fan of “half-assing” work. If you’re going to do it, do it right.
  • I typically think of the MVP - the Minimum Viable Product as the goal. Once that’s complete we can think about soft requirements and fun features.
  • Teaching others as I learn is key. I believe you only really know something when you can teach someone else.

Personal stuff

Online, I go by ssebs.

More about my hobbies

Music

I’ve got a weird taste in music, lots of Metal, some Hip Hop, Pop, and EDM.

Here are some of my Spotify playlists

Metal , Rock, & Country

EDM & Pop

Songs from my wedding <3

Say hi

Get in touch if you want to talk about any of this.