Haider Toha
haider toha london, uk
github • email • linkedin • twitter
founding forward deployed engineer at zymbly (yc w26). we build voice-first ai agents for aircraft maintenance, the kind that let a technician talk through a fault, surface the right manual page and file compliant paperwork without touching a keyboard. aviation maintenance runs on a global shortage of something like 43,000 technicians and a mountain of admin that eats half a working day. we’re chipping at that.
my background is aeronautics, so this is the work that makes sense to me in a way most other problems haven’t. i write code across the stack, typescript on the frontend to python on the backend with postgres underneath, and most of my time goes into building features end-to-end, from the interface to the api to making sure it holds under load.
before this i was at sammy labs (yc w25) working on computational law, compiling statutes, case law and operating procedures into deterministic engines so compliance questions could be answered with a single api call and a provenance trail. and before that goldman sachs, mostly large-scale systems and internal tooling.
i spend a fair bit of time with customers, on calls, debugging issues live, working out what’s actually blocking them versus what they say is blocking them. the best things i’ve shipped came from watching someone struggle with the product.
what i care about is clean abstractions, fast feedback loops and code that's easy to delete. i'd rather ship something small that works than something ambitious that doesn't.
outside of work i'm usually at the gym, playing cricket or on late-night walks through hyde park when i need to think. i coach my local kids football team, which is the most grounding thing i do each week. recently started gliding and working towards my pilot’s licence.
i read too much. mostly history, philosophy and whatever rabbit hole has me that week.