Plural.com
Ahmed Tarek, known online as “Tokyo” or “a-tokyo,” is a computer engineer, AI practitioner, and product-driven engineering leader working at the intersection of real-time AI, large-scale systems, and human-centric design. He is the CTO of Plural.com, an AI-native hiring marketplace focused on turning messy, fragmented job data into precise and trustworthy matches at scale.
Throughout his career, Ahmed has led teams delivering production systems across web, mobile, and cloud infrastructure, with a particular focus on low-latency AI experiences, event-driven backends, and developer experience. He is also a highly active open-source contributor: on GitHub, he maintains a substantial portfolio of public projects and is recognized as an Arctic Code Vault Contributor. His libraries, including apple-signin-auth and react-apple-signin-auth, have become reference implementations for “Sign in with Apple,” powering millions of authentications and serving as foundational building blocks in hundreds of products worldwide. Alongside his own projects, he has contributed to many third-party and community libraries across the JavaScript and React Native ecosystems, strengthening the reliability and security of tools that engineering teams rely on every day.
Before moving fully into product and startup leadership, Ahmed spent several years in academic research in human–computer interaction and AI. At the University of Passau he helped design wearable biofeedback systems that brought clinical-grade monitoring into everyday life, work that led to multiple peer-reviewed publications, including the IEEE paper “Biofeedback in the Wild – A Smartwatch Approach,” as well as follow-up research on large-scale biofeedback frameworks and preference modelling in intelligent systems.
Ahmed studied computer and electrical engineering at the German University in Cairo and Universität Passau, pairing a strong theoretical foundation with hands-on experience in applied machine learning, recommendation systems, and large-scale web architectures. Today he continues to operate as both builder and strategist at Plural.com: leading engineering teams, designing AI-first hiring infrastructure, contributing to open source, and sharing his experience on topics such as real-time AI, agentic systems, and practical AI infrastructure.