Erfan Gholami
I’ve spent seven years building maps, location systems and user-owned data — natively, in Kotlin, mostly as a team of one.
Profile
I'm an Android engineer, and for seven years I've been shipping production apps — modular payment clients, offline-first mapping platforms, and lately the tools that give people their own data back. Maps and location are the work I love most: MapLibre, OpenStreetMap, CameraX, raw GNSS, tracking that respects the battery. Since 2023 that has grown into the Solid Protocol — open-source work the NLnet Foundation funds and I publish to Maven Central. I've usually been the only Android engineer on the project, so I've learned to own architecture, performance and delivery end to end — and that's how I like to work: handed a problem, not a spec, and trusted with the whole of it.
Experience
Freelance Android Engineer
Self-employed · NLnet Foundation
- I'm the sole Android engineer on Fotoshi — an offline-first geospatial capture app on MapLibre, fusing a filtered location fix, raw GNSS and Camera2 metadata into every photo.
- I'm building Solid Share, an open-source Solid-pod data wallet, under an NLnet grant.
- I delivered Samoun, a full RTL Persian charity-coordination app on Clean Architecture and Apollo GraphQL.
Android Engineer
- I was the primary contributor to the B2C consumer app and built most of the B2B merchant companion — both Kotlin, both on an MVP architecture.
- I shipped the payment flow end to end: biometric and PIN auth, camera-based card scanning, and a WebView-driven 3-D Secure step with card tokens on a separate PCI-scope gateway.
- I built Green Coins loyalty, in-store One-Click Pay QR scanning, and the Firebase Remote Config gate on the minimum shipped version.
Android Engineer
- I helped rewrite Eways, a consumer e-payment platform, into a multi-module MVVM/RxJava 2 architecture, and built the unit-testing setup that caught regressions before release.
- I worked on Hamoon — a bespoke platform whose screens are server-driven XML parsed at runtime, and whose feature code is class-loaded from separately downloaded APKs.
Android Developer
- I built MobileGIS — a full-featured GIS app on OpenStreetMap with drawing, area and distance measurement, OSRM routing and GeoJSON overlays. This is where the maps obsession began.
- I delivered EsfahanCartoMap, an enterprise field-inspection app for Isfahan Municipality, with penalty reports gated on a GPS fix within 100 m of the target.
Research
Android Solid Services
Politecnico di Torino · PonderSource
2023 – Present · The Solid Protocol as a native Android citizen — one sign-in, shared pod access, typed data over IPC. My M.S. thesis, grown into ecosystem infrastructure.
Distributed DAF
Shahid Beheshti University · B.S. Thesis
2020 · Subgraph matching at cluster scale — the DAF algorithm from SIGMOD 2019, rebuilt on Apache Spark GraphX. My B.S. thesis.
Education
M.S. Computer Engineering
Politecnico di Torino
2021 — 2025 · Turin, Italy · Software. Ranked #92 in the world, QS 2024.
B.S. Computer Engineering
Shahid Beheshti University
2015 — 2020 · Tehran, Iran · Top 6 universities in Iran.
Diploma, Mathematics and Physics
NODET
2011 — 2015 · Sanandaj, Iran · The national gifted-students programme.
References
“Erfan was a very talented, professional and tenacious software engineer working on our open source projects around Solid and Android, building things that nobody had managed to build before. I was very impressed with his work style and his result, and I would definitely recommend hiring him for any advanced software development work on and around the Android platform!”
Michiel de JongEx-Mozilla, ex-RippleManaged me directly on the Solid and Android work“I've worked alongside Erfan for over a year now. During the past year, I have seen him not only excel at the core elements of his job — like developing complex views and algorithms in Android — but also being willing to learn and explore cutting-edge technology, like Kotlin and Flutter. What I like most about Erfan is his self-motivation, discipline and coherence at work and personal life. We are lucky to have him on our team and I have optimistic predictions for his career trajectory.”
Mahsa SanijiOS DeveloperWorked with me on the same team at HafHashtadBoth are public recommendations on my LinkedIn, quoted in full. Read them at the source — contactable referees on request.