Lead backend engineer with 8+ years designing high-throughput APIs, event-driven services, and multi-cloud infrastructure (AWS/GCP/Azure/Cloudflare). Leading a team of 10 engineers today, and have architected systems serving 1B+ monthly requests while cutting cloud spend by $4K+/month.
Shipped AI/LLM systems to production - RAG pipelines, tool-calling agents, and MCP servers - alongside the platform work that keeps them dependable: CI/CD, observability, security hardening, and cost efficiency.
Work Experience
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Apr '25 - Present
Lead Software Engineer (Backend)
riskprofiler.ioRiskProfiler Cyber Security
Leading the backend team at RiskProfiler, a cybersecurity startup that helps organizations assess and manage their attack surface and security risk.
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Leadership & Mentorship
- Grew the backend team from 5 to 10 engineers, owning the hiring loop, onboarding, and recurring 1:1 mentoring.
- Drive quarterly roadmap and OKR planning alongside founders and product managers, turning business goals into scoped engineering milestones.
- Set the design-doc and review culture: authored and reviewed design docs for 7+ initiatives before implementation started, and raised the bar on code and architecture reviews.
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AI & LLM Engineering
- Shipped a RAG pipeline on Google Gemini and Vertex AI that auto-fills security questionnaires, cutting manual effort by 80%.
- Built tool-calling AI agents with Google ADK that triage, summarize, and prioritize security findings.
- Designed agentic workflows that enrich and correlate attack-surface and asset-scan data, turning raw scan output into structured attack paths.
- Wrote MCP server exposing the existing REST API to AI clients, allowing users to query their attack surface from any AI client.
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Architecture, Security & Reliability
- Architect microservices around clear bounded contexts and service ownership, communicating over event-driven queues and fronted by an API gateway with service-to-service auth.
- Run scalable APIs and serverless data pipelines in Python, JavaScript, and Go, absorbing 5M+ API requests and 10M+ cloud asset scans a month at high availability.
- Operate across AWS, GCP, and Cloudflare, trimming over $4K/month of cloud spend without giving up performance or scale.
- Hardened the platform end to end: AWS Cognito authentication, WAF rules, rate limiting and DDoS mitigation, DNS and CDN configuration on Cloudflare, and secrets management with scheduled key rotation.
- Enforce OWASP Top 10 hardening and zero-trust access in design and code review.
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Delivery & Developer Experience
- Instrumented the stack with centralized logging, distributed tracing across services, and actionable monitoring and alerting, so failures surface before customers report them.
- Rolled out AI coding assistants and AI-assisted code review across the team with usage guidelines and guardrails, increasing productivity by 30%.
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Jun '21 - Apr '25
Senior Software Engineer (Backend)
animall.inAnimall
Built and managed the backend and cloud infrastructure of Animall, a series-B funded startup that operates in the dairy farming space.
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Product Development & Business Impact
- Built high-throughput APIs handling 1B+ monthly requests using TypeScript (NestJS), Python (FastAPI), and Node.js (Express), across two core monoliths plus extracted notification and ML services communicating over queues and event streams.
- Designed a real-time user feed on MongoDB aggregation pipelines, processing millions of documents with millisecond latency.
- Shipped a real-time vehicle allocation system for logistics using VROOM and GraphHopper, eliminating 60+ hours of manual operations daily.
- Partnered with data scientists to productionize models on Airflow and Kubernetes (EKS) at 3K+ model runs per day.
- Carved out a no-code notification service with Strapi, letting marketing launch campaigns independently and reclaiming 10% of engineering capacity.
- Scoped requirements with product managers and agreed OpenAPI contracts with the Android and web teams before implementation, so client work never waited on the backend.
- Built internal tooling so ops and support could debug live production issues without escalating to engineering.
- Drove architecture for major initiatives by authoring design docs, circulating them across backend, mobile, and data teams, and presenting technical direction to founders.
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Debugging, Performance & Cost Efficiency
- Traced 10+ second response times to unselective query plans and missing composite indexes, then reworked MySQL schemas and indexing to land at 500 ms across a 10M+ user dataset.
- Diagnosed a per-instance connection ceiling that only surfaced at peak load, tuning Nginx and Linux settings to get 3x connections per instance and cut compute cost.
- Self-hosted Sentry and used its stack traces to eliminate recurring client-side bugs at their source.
- Root-caused an unexplained cloud cost spike, then led multi-cloud optimization across AWS and GCP that cut infrastructure spend by 20% ($2K+ monthly).
- Re-architected API authentication with JWT, reducing latency by 10ms across 1B+ monthly requests and saving $10K+ annually in infrastructure costs.
- Modernized legacy codebases through refactoring and modularization, reducing technical debt by 50% and improving long-term maintainability.
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Automation & DevOps Enhancements
- Migrated the company from OpenVPN to Tailscale, raising VPN capacity 50x and enabling zero-trust cloud connectivity.
- Set up GitHub Actions CI/CD pipelines for AWS and GCP with automated test and coverage gates on every pull request, improving release stability and supporting multiple daily releases.
- Automated on-demand dev environments for a 10-engineer team, removing manual coordination.
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Jul '18 - Jun '21
Software Developer (Full-Stack)
ethicalhat.comEthicalHat Cyber Security
Built online platforms that help security professionals assess their attack surface. Key projects:
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Serverless platform for discovering security issues
- Built Lambda and Fargate workloads in Python, Go, and JavaScript, shipped via the Serverless framework.
- Designed an event-driven architecture on SNS, and rate-limited outbound calls to third-party APIs with SQS FIFO queues to stay inside vendor quotas.
- Tuned DynamoDB schemas and indices to query patterns, using streams to aggregate counts across categories.
- Built user management on Cognito, behind REST APIs on API Gateway and Lambda.
- Cut front-end deployment time 15x by moving from AWS Amplify to S3 and CloudFront, and made service deployments 4x faster with a dependency resolution script.
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Full-stack application to run security scans
- Implemented the UI with Semantic UI and the back-end with Django, across PostgreSQL and MongoDB.
- Integrated multiple security scanners and vulnerability feeds into a single attack-surface view, run as background and periodic jobs on Celery with RabbitMQ.
- Developed a large-scale domain search feature using Elasticsearch to scan 250M+ domains.
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csat.cisecurity.org
Controls Self-Assessment Tool (CSAT)
Developed for the Center for Internet Security (CIS), USA- Developed the full-stack application, implementing the UI with Semantic UI and the back-end with Django.
- Owned core features end to end as the sole engineer on them, including third-party integrations such as Slack, and containerized the app with Docker and Docker Compose.
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Projects
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faheel.in/contour-quest
Contour Quest: Android country-shape puzzle
- Built an Android puzzle where you photograph an object, trace its outline, and match it against 200 simplified country shapes from Natural Earth.
- Implemented the camera capture and tracing flow in Kotlin with Jetpack Compose, CameraX, and Interactive Image Segmenter.
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blr-housing.faheel.in
Bangalore Housing Projects: interactive land-value map
- Built an interactive map of Bangalore housing projects, colour-coded by land value, in HTML, CSS, and Leaflet.
- Scraped the data from multiple sources and aggregated it into a single dataset.
- Added filters for availability, category, bedrooms, and more so listings can be compared without leaving the map.
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pypi.org/project/cleanup
CleanUp: CLI for organising files
- Developed a command line utility in Python using Docopt that organises files in a directory into subdirectories based on their extensions.
- Used Beautiful Soup for scraping a list of extensions for each available file category on FileInfo.com.
- Set up continuous integration with GitHub Actions, and published the project on PyPI.
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pypi.org/project/desktop-entry-creator
Desktop Entry Creator for Linux
- Built a Python and GTK GUI for creating Linux desktop entries for installed applications.
- Published the tool on PyPI so it can be installed with pip.