Dzaka Athif

Forward Deployed Engineer · Manager

• ▸Lyra places engineers inside fast-moving startups. As a Forward Deployed Engineer I join a client's team, ship in their codebase and own features end to end.
• ▸Joined as a Junior Forward Deployed Engineer in Dec 2024 and was promoted to manager in Nov 2025, starting with a team of 5 and leading 12–13 people at the peak.
• ▸I still ship every day while managing: planning the work, reviewing code and keeping the team unblocked.

• Leadership
• TypeScript
• Python
• Next.js

Software Engineer (contract, via Lyra)

• ▸A research lab building the environments, tasks and benchmarks that AI agents are trained and tested on. 1,300+ commits across nine of their codebases.
• ▸Started on their data platform: a SQL workspace with charts, a marketplace for sharing datasets, and database sync, plus a full design refresh.
• ▸Built browser extensions and the web apps behind them for collecting AI training data: screen and page recording for contributors, and the review tools that check every submission.
• ▸Since late 2025, building high-fidelity clones of everyday apps (email, calendar, chat, CRM, code hosting, social and e-commerce) for agents to practise computer use in, along with hundreds of graded tasks and the reward functions that score them.
• ▸Also writing safety benchmarks that check whether agents can be tricked into risky actions, such as following instructions hidden in the data they read.

• Next.js
• TypeScript
• Python
• Playwright
• AI agents

• ▸A four-room house you can walk around, rendered with three.js at low resolution with edge outlines and an ordered dither so it reads as pixel art.
• ▸Furniture from Kenney's CC0 Furniture Kit; the car, gym gear and the little guy are hand-built from blocks.

• Next.js
• three.js
• Tailwind

TikTok · @randomlife1804

• ▸Short videos about walking every day: the routes, the step counts and keeping the streak alive.

• TikTok
• Walking

• ▸At least 15,000 steps every single day.
• ▸I post the walks on TikTok as Walking Engineer.

• 15k steps a day

• ▸I was obsessed with it right up until I got married in February. These days it's once a week.
• ▸Proudest moment: 7 reps on the seated chest press machine.

• Strength

Sydney Run Club

• ▸Joined the society's monthly sessions while I was at uni.

• Running