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A Danish renaissance castle mirrored in still water under a high white moon and quiet clouds.

Story

The full story, with the CV at the end.

Johan Christian Dahl, Frederiksborg Castle by Moonlight, 1817. Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen

Khaled Waleed
Khaled Waleed, hung here since August 2026.

It all started when I chose to get out of my bedroom and start talking to real people. My father had died in 2014, I was the eldest son in a family of five, and one of his friends had a supermarket in Al-Harithiya, Baghdad, that needed employees, so at fourteen I was restocking shelves, obsessing over making every can show its Pepsi logo first, and learning to deal with impatient adults before I even had a high school ID. Two years later I found out I'm too good for this.

I applied for an internship at The Town Studio as a graphic designer, got in, and made decent designs for surgeons and beauty brands with the help of great people, then decided graphic design isn't really for me and switched to designing interfaces. A friend got me started with code and I taught myself the rest. In October 2021 I found an opening at Speetu, a studio in Amsterdam, applied, and got it, so at seventeen, still in high school, I was a design engineer, the same title I use today. The same month I started Vitex, my own studio, with the motto it still carries, software, pretty and perfect.

At eighteen I joined Digital Logic and started building for the government, the public website and booking flow of the Iraqi Electronic Passport and frontends for the ports and the shipping agencies. I made the passport booking form beautiful and friendly, they later rebuilt it on a low-code platform and it got worse.

In January 2025 I joined Enjaz, the e-government arm of Qi, Iraq's largest e-payment company, as the youngest of its 3,000+ employees and the only frontend engineer on seven government platforms. Within a year I had rebuilt and redesigned all seven, then I found three engineers, ran their interviews, brought them in, and trained them, and now I lead the four of us. The platforms serve more than four million people, and Oil Coupon alone reaches three million families. I put sounds and animations into business dashboards so people would enjoy using them, and I helped write The Perfect Interface, a long file of rules every app in the company has to follow, down to the teeny tiny details nobody would even notice.

Vitex grew up next to all of it, there are four of us now, with products of our own. I also run the technology at the Ishtar Center, a democracy NGO, and I'm finishing a computer engineering degree on the side. Outside work I read, watch films, cook, and sometimes write.

The name in Arabic is خالد وليد: Khaled Waleed in English, sometimes spelled Khalid Waleed or Khaled Walid.

Where I’ve worked

  1. since Jan 2025 · Full-time, Baghdad, on-site

    Enjaz

    Frontend Lead

    • Hired as the sole frontend engineer for seven government platforms; rebuilt and redesigned every app within a year.
    • Built the frontend team: scouted all three hires from the market, ran their interviews and trial tasks, then trained and onboarded them; now lead the four, owning code review, standards, and release quality.
    • Portfolio serves 4+ million users, including Oil Coupon, Super Qi’s most-used miniapp (3+ million families), and the systems managing the state OPDC’s oil-product distribution to gas stations, bakeries, generators, and farms nationwide.
    • Designed and built Enjaz’s own corporate website, enjaz.tech.
  2. since Feb 2024 · Part-time, Baghdad, hybrid

    Ishtar Center for Democracy Support

    Director of AI & Technology

    • Center member of an Iraqi NGO advancing democracy and human rights; own all of its technology.
    • Work with Iraq’s top researchers, applying advanced AI models to the center’s research.
    • Built and operate ishtarcenter.com and the center’s conference website.
  3. since Oct 2021 · Self-employed, Baghdad, remote

    Vitex

    Founder & Lead Engineer

    • Run a four-person design-engineering studio (“Software, pretty and perfect”) building web platforms and mobile apps for Iraqi enterprises and NGOs.
    • Built Iraq Loto, the country’s national 42+1 lottery, alone: design, player app, back office, backend, deploys. One Cloudflare Worker serves three sales channels (the web, a Super Qi mini app, POS terminals in shops); it replaced the old system in September 2026 with 480K+ accounts carried over, and reports every draw to the Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs.
    • Built Quick EV, the Arabic and English website of Iraq’s first EV charging network, with a station map and no photos: every picture is a to-scale line drawing of the real GRASEN chargers.
    • Built Risha end to end (mobile app, dashboard, website): e-learning connecting Iraq’s sixth-preparatory students with elite private tutors. 25K+ downloads, custom cross-device DRM; led all design and frontend.
    • Built and operate Auction Key, a car-auction brokerage platform with built-in ERP and white-label apps, powering Al-Nejoum Al-Zahera’s operations: 1,000+ cars and $3M+ in transactions monthly.
    • Rocca Menu, a multi-tenant QR-menu SaaS for restaurants, is live in 20+ venues.
    • Shipped platforms for the Afaq Al-Obaidi subsidiaries (Smartic for employment, National Foodstuff, Auto Zone, Golden Lube, Al-Obaidi General Trading, Taj Al-Salem, Almadafaat) and an archiving system for the Al-Amal Association.
    • Operate 20+ production client deployments on Cloudflare (Workers, Pages, D1, R2).
  4. Feb 2024 to Dec 2024 · Part-time, Baghdad, hybrid

    Morshed

    Software Engineer

    • Built Morshed’s website, accounting ERP, and internal workflow systems, then shipped websites and ERPs for its clients.
    • Owned the whole digital transformation of the business-development & PR firm.
  5. Oct 2022 to Dec 2024 · Full-time, Baghdad, on-site

    Digital Logic

    Frontend Engineer

    • Built the Iraqi Electronic Passport platform’s public website and appointment-booking flow, plus the frontends for the General Company for Ports of Iraq and the Shipping Agencies systems.
    • Mentored three interns through their first production features.
  6. Oct 2021 to Oct 2022 · Part-time, Amsterdam, remote

    Speetu

    Design Engineer

    • Designed and built websites for Dutch brands, Inflexio among them.
  7. Jun 2021 to Oct 2021 · Full-time, Baghdad, on-site

    The Town Studio

    Graphic Designer

    • Produced print and digital brand assets (brochures, posters, social-media sets, web graphics), mostly for beauty and organic brands, doctors, and surgeons.
  8. Apr 2019 to Jun 2021 · Full-time, Baghdad, on-site

    Nakhlat Baghdad

    Cashier & Store Assistant

    • First job ever, in a mid-sized Al-Harithiya supermarket: checkout, inventory, and restocking, learning to handle impatient adults before having a high-school ID.

The same history on LinkedIn, or as a two-page PDF.

View the CV

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