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!”
“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.”
Both are public recommendations on my LinkedIn, quoted in full. Read them at the source — contactable referees on request.