My Story

Back in the early 2000s my father used to resell computer products part-time and I grew up playing with RAMs, cleaning the carbon off them, fixing bad sectors on hard disks alongside him, and taking apart broken ones to play with the magnets. That is where my interest in computers started early.

We had a Pentium I at home with 32 MB RAM, a 15 GB hard disk, occasionally using floppy disks for different hardware drivers on Windows 98. Mechanical white keyboard, big chunky fat monitor, and my favorite thing: a CD of Sega 600 games. Between the games, I was installing Windows, figuring out drivers, doing disk partitioning through the command line. I did not know it then, but I was already doing a bit of engineering.

That changed in my first year of university when I wrote my first computer virus that would shut down the PC every time someone would start it - turns out, writing a small virus was way cooler than writing a complete e-commerce application back then lol :). Something clicked and I started loving engineering in a way I had not felt before. I would go for hours without thinking about food, just focused on building and learning, watching professors on Computerphile and Numberphile for two hours straight and enjoying every minute. That curiosity has stayed with me ever since.

Early in my career, I got outsourced as an associate engineer to a billion-dollar organization where I got to dig into performance improvement and improving the quality of search for the largest CU organization in the US, PSCU. I got lucky with good mentors there who shaped how I think about code quality and software design. At another company, I learned to move fast, do integrations, juggle between problems, and that is where I built my first closed-source JavaScript library for undo and redo in a landing page builder that integrated with a CMS and analytics.

From there I got into Systems Limited, one of Pakistan's top tech companies. There I worked on a $50M Series B product building real-time bidding systems and notification engines. I was lucky to work directly with a VP of Architecture who really shaped my thinking around engineering optimization and system design. They gave me the opportunity to contribute to three core features and consult for two core teams, which changed a lot of how I approach problems.

Wanting more exposure, I moved to Upwork where I got to work on all kinds of things: cloud infrastructure, DevOps tooling, distributed databases like Cloud Spanner, VPC peering on Azure, automations on bare-metal Linux machines on Hetzner, and Android emulator clusters on on-prem servers. I built scheduling engines for medical systems and worked directly with stakeholders at Fortune 500 companies and fast-growing startups. At one 200+ person company, I led a testing restructuring using functional programming to bring end-to-end testability to a product that was being used at Yahoo. Each project pushed me to write better software.

From there I joined the United Nations DGACM team as a senior engineer, taking on new challenges across the stack. I worked on everything from automation and performance testing to building custom scripts, cloud automations, Terraform, security pipelines, and database improvements. That experience led me to a lead and interim CTO role at a company where I managed 20+ people and delivered end-to-end projects, including a distributed system for restaurant kitchens using microservices, Terraform, AWS, and gRPC.

After that I led engineering at ROUTD, a $20M+ routing platform in the UK. I worked on the core platform and delivered features that moved the product forward. I also helped my team and CEO in build vs buy decisions and sat in meetings with people from Amazon (VPs, program managers, engineering managers), British Petroleum, and top executives from Compass Group. Being in those rooms taught me how to communicate with people who think at a different level and how to translate technical details into business impact.

I like going outside the box when needed. At Olostep, we needed a way for our servers to connect to users' local machines so they could run browser automations from their own apps without spinning up expensive cloud browsers. We used a reverse proxy for this, but the open-source library Piko did not support connecting users based on a token, so I added that ability. Small change, big cost savings for clients.

These days I work remotely for Ampwise, a B2B AI automation platform where I build production microservices and AI pipelines, and Olostep, building structured web search for AI.