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Work Background
Sopra Financial TechnologySenior Cloud Architect
Oct. 2024Designing Payments & FinTech Services in AWS & Azure - Designing high-performance & compliant cloud-native (AWS & Azure) or hybrid or on-prem architectures tailored for Payments and FinTech domains, ensuring scalability, resilience, and cost-efficiency across cloud-native and hybrid models. - Architectures strictly adhered to GDPR and DORA compliance, improving customer trust and audit readiness. Optimizing Cloud Services - Optimized multi-region cloud environments for production and non-production workloads - Leveraging AWS stack like EC2, EKS, RDS, EBS, ELB, API Gateway, S3, and CloudFront. - Leveraging Azure stack like Azure VM, AKS, Azure SQL / Azure DB, Front Door / CDN, ALB / App Gateway, Functions, ACI Maximizing ROI with Cloud Strategies - Delivered ROI-optimized cloud strategies by analyzing business goals, application demands, and regulatory requirements, resulting in a 25% reduction in infrastructure overhead while enabling faster customer onboarding and service delivery. Cost Modeling - Developed custom cost models and growth-aligned scaling strategies, accurately forecasting compute, storage, and network utilization based on customer SLAs and future workload projections. - These models improved cost predictability and long-term scalability planning. Cross-Functional Collaboration - Collaborated with cross-functional squads (DevOps, Compliance, Security, and Architecture) to validate and deliver cloud blueprints, ensuring alignment with product timelines, regulatory mandates, and customer-specific data residency and availability needs.
SBSSenior / Lead Software Architect
May. 2022 - Sep. 2024SaaS Readiness & Cloud Migration for Digital Banking Platform - Led a comprehensive SaaS readiness assessment for Sopra Banking’s Digital Banking Platform, creating a structured 3-tier priority roadmap covering 100+ readiness criteria. - Coordinated cross-functional teams (Architecture, Development, QA, DevOps, SRE, Product) to ensure clear ownership and execution plans across all critical domains. - Successfully orchestrated the migration from on-premises to AWS cloud, reducing operational costs by 20% and increasing efficiency by 50%. API-First Strategy and Lifecycle Governance - Championed the API-First approach across 17 squads (150+ engineers across 4 regions), enabling consistent and contract-compliant multi-version API delivery. - Designed and implemented full API lifecycle governance including API review, release, deprecation, retirement, and contract testing for both producers and consumers. - Enabled parallel build, test, deployment, and monitoring of multiple API versions, reducing API-related production defects by 30%. Secure, Compliant, and Scalable SaaS Architecture - Designed secure, domain-driven, containerized, and auto-scalable cloud-native architectures using Docker, Kubernetes, and AWS (EC2, EKS, RDS, EBS, ELB, API Gateway, S3, CloudFront). - Aligned architectural patterns to ensure GDPR and DORA compliance for SaaS offerings in the Payments and FinTech domains, supporting both single and multi-tenant models. - Achieved a 40% increase in platform reliability and customer onboarding efficiency. MTTR Reduction and Observability - Standardized error handling, logging, and incident tracking mechanisms across domain teams, resulting in a 40% reduction in Mean Time to Repair (MTTR). - Rolled out production-ready monitoring dashboards and alerting systems to improve root cause analysis and proactive issue detection.
Mindshine - Mental Health CoachingSoftware Engineering Manager
Mar. 2021 - Apr. 2022Strategic KPI Alignment & Roadmap Execution - Partnered with company leadership to define the North Star KPI: 5000 Monthly Active Paid Users. - Translated this into team-wide OKRs and an actionable sprint roadmap (3-week cycles), driving measurable progress through structured reporting at monthly and quarterly intervals. Cloud Cost Optimization & Tech Stack Standardization - Reduced monthly cloud and development costs by over €9,000 (from €13,000 to €4,000) by executing a migration to AWS and outsourcing engineering to Pakistan. - Standardized the technology stack across Mobile (React Native), Web (React.js), and Backend (Ruby), enabling faster onboarding and feature delivery. Serverless Data Analytics Platform - Architected and led the development of a C-level analytics platform using AWS Lambda (Python), Hasura GraphQL, PostgreSQL (TimescaleDB on EC2), and Tableau. Delivered a scalable, real-time data pipeline enabling actionable insights and improved decision-making for leadership. Boosting User Acquisition & Retention - Implemented A/B testing which revealed 70% user preference for PayPal. - Led integration of PayPal for monthly, quarterly, and annual subscriptions, increasing user engagement by 30% and retention by 15% within three months, while also enabling entry into new countries/regions. Team Building & Cultural Transformation - Recruited a cross-functional team from scratch, including Software Engineers, QA, DevOps, and Data Engineers. - Cultivated a psychologically safe and ownership-driven culture emphasizing collaborative decision-making and continuous delivery of outcomes.
WemoloCloud Architect
Sep. 2020 - Feb. 2021Strategic Cloud Foundation for Parking System - Led the end-to-end design and implementation of cloud-based architecture for a smart parking management system. Architected AWS-based serverless solutions involving smart camera integrations (AWS IoT Core), ETL pipelines, and microservices (AWS Lambda + API Gateway + Hasura GraphQL on Fargate). - Designed & delivered repeatable, secure, and scalable cloud infrastructure using Terraform/Terragrunt, automating provisioning of key AWS services including VPC, EC2, Route53, Secret Manager, WAF, CloudFront, and IAM roles. Automated deployment pipelines across dev, staging, and production using GitLab CI/CD - Implemented robust rollouts across multiple AWS regions and availability zones, optimizing capacity, failover, and cost-performance trade-offs per customer/region constraints. Designed with multi-environment segregation to meet performance and compliance expectations. - Designed ETL pipelines for parking violation detection and payment collection, supporting timeframes from minutes to yearly aggregation. Enabled precise reporting and analytics for Parking Space Owners & Internal Stakeholders. - Designed Real-Time dashboards for occupancy tracking and fine collection, and an internal dashboard to monitor parking violations and financial reconciliation, supporting high-resolution insights for operational and financial decisions.
WirecardSenior Software Architect
Jan. 2020 - Aug. 2020Modernizing Merchant Onboarding & Engagement Lifecycle - Redesigned and modernized legacy monolithic systems into a microservices-based architecture using Java, Spring Boot, and Domain-Driven Design (DDD) for the Merchant Onboarding and Engagement Lifecycle, improving system maintainability and time-to-market for feature enhancements. - Decomposed the legacy onboarding platform into 10+ scalable, cloud-native services, enabling independent deployment and horizontal scaling, which increased platform availability and reduced deployment risk. - Accelerated merchant onboarding timelines from 3 months to 2 weeks by implementing a Camunda-based orchestration engine, automating complex workflows, reducing manual interventions by 40%, and improving visibility into onboarding processes. - Led data migration strategy from multiple siloed systems to a unified onboarding database, achieving 98% data accuracy and 95% successful integration using Apache Kafka as an event-streaming backbone. - Collaborated with cross-functional teams including product owners, legal, and compliance to design regulatory-compliant onboarding flows, reducing onboarding exceptions and increasing operational efficiency. - Introduced real-time monitoring and logging for onboarding pipelines, enabling faster issue resolution and improved stakeholder trust in onboarding performance metrics.
UNIQLOEngineering Lead / Cloud Architect
Jul. 2018 - Dec. 2019Global E-Commerce Delivery Leadership – Cart & Checkout Platform: - Architected and delivered a robust Cart & Checkout microservices ecosystem for Uniqlo’s global e-commerce platform, managing 40+ RESTful APIs supporting over 1,000 orders per minute with seamless integration into Uniqlo's Mobile App (iOS/Android), Web, and Customer Support Portal. - Led and scaled a distributed 15-member engineering team across Japan, China, and India, overseeing hiring, onboarding, and mentoring across roles like backend engineers, QA, SRE, and DevOps, which resulted in 35% improvement in team satisfaction and 75% retention growth. - Provisioned scalable, cost-effective cloud infrastructure using Terraform for multi-region deployments across dev, staging, and production environments. Achieved high availability, optimized failover, and ensured cloud rollouts were aligned with business timelines and capacity demands. - Defined and monitored SLI/SLO/SLA metrics for application health, cloud infrastructure, performance, and business KPIs. Built custom dashboards and alerting systems for real-time observability and root-cause analysis. - Established a blameless, ownership-driven culture, improving team satisfaction by 35% and resource retention by 75%, fostering a collaborative and high-performance engineering environment. - Elevated customer experience and NPS by integrating direct customer feedback into design decisions, driving the development of impactful features that aligned with Uniqlo’s brand promise. - Collaborated with UI/UX, product, sales, and marketing to align technical deliverables with user behavior analytics and business goals, contributing to a significant increase in platform stability, conversion rate, and customer satisfaction.
VentureDivePrincipal Software Engineer / Tech Lead
Jan. 2018 - Jun. 2018End-to-End Trip Planning & User Engagement: - Designed and developed an end-to-end trip planning experience by designing and implementing key features such as multi-leg layovers, real-time trip notifications, personalized user journeys, and interactive mapping, resulting in a 20% increase in user engagement and 15% rise in overall platform adoption. - Built a scalable loyalty and rewards engine that incentivized repeat usage through gamified rewards, targeted promotions, and tiered discounts—boosting user retention by 25% and contributing to a 10% increase in revenue. - Introduced clean coding standards, test-driven development, and continuous integration practices to streamline development workflows and reduce production defects.
Rakuten TravelSenior Application Engineer / Team Lead
Oct. 2016 - Dec. 2017Next-Generation Search Engine for Rakuten Travel: - Led the end-to-end redesign and development of Rakuten Travel’s next-generation search engine, achieving <100ms query response SLA while supporting multilingual (CJK) input with high linguistic accuracy, enabling domain-aware and context-sensitive keyword search. - Boosted sales conversion by 25% through implementation of personalized, location-aware search and dynamic pricing algorithms for hotels, airlines, and seasonal travel products. - Designed and integrated key search technologies using Elasticsearch (for keyword search frequency & geo-sparial search using 2D map tiles system with WGS84 to UTM conversion & projection), GraphDB (for relevance and inference modeling), WordNet dictionaries (for semantic expansion), and custom-built modules for language detection, stop/abuse word filtering, and auto-correction/completion using N-Shingles, N-Gram, TST, and Distance Tree algorithms. - Developed a scalable tagging infrastructure, linking structured tags to real-time inventory and metadata to support standard tag-based search and filtering, improving both discovery and ranking accuracy. - Instituted Test-Driven Development (TDD) across a multi-regional engineering team, reaching 99% code and 95% test coverage, drastically improving the testability and stability of the platform. - Reduced defect rate to below 1% through rigorous code reviews, static code analysis, and full-spectrum testing (unit, integration, regression, contract), ensuring release reliability in a high-load, multi-language search environment. Enhanced Travel Discovery & Engagement: - Developed a geospatial tourism app backed by Rakuten Travel Ecosystem. - Designed a scalable, location-aware travel platform, improving engagement with real-time geospatial content to enhance travel discovery & planning. - Strengthened Rakuten Travel’s ecosystem, increased 25% engagement & 15% conversions from travel discovery to direct bookings.
Career BreakFull-time parenting
Jul. 2016 - Sep. 2016
Gallery SystemsPrincipal Software Engineer
May. 2015 - Jul. 2016Building Custom Built Enterprise-Grade Audit System: - As part of a museum-focused ERP suite, implementing a secure, scalable, and high-performance Enterprise Audit Trail system critical for preserving digital traceability of changes to rare and high-value assets like books, paintings, sculptures & historical objects. - Designed and developed a custom-built audit trail platform using Java, RESTful Web Services, SQL Server Change Data Capture (CDC), and native audit features, enabling end-to-end digital traceability and. - Conducted extensive research and PoCs to identify and mitigate risks associated with audit trail logging and forensic requirements as well as elevation of audit quality & system accountability. - Automated audit logging and data capture mechanisms to ensure integrity, confidentiality and visibility of actions across modules, ensuring efficient audit logging & tracking, data capture & digital forensic traceability.
i2c Inc.Senior Software Engineer / Team Lead
Nov. 2008 - Apr. 2015Modernizing High-Volume OLTP Systems for Global Payment Networks: - Led the architectural revamp and end-to-end development of a secure, high-throughput Online Transaction Processing (OLTP) system supporting multi-threaded, peer-to-peer financial transactions across global networks. - Designed and implemented a scalable Java-based core and enterprise architecture to support Visa and Mastercard initially, later expanded to Discover and American Express. - Achieved 300ms response time (TPS/QPS) and 99.9% system availability under high load, enabling business expansion across North America, Europe, Latin America, the Middle East, and Africa. - Reduced latency and improved system resilience for real-time financial processing across multiple time zones. Designing Secure, Compliant Data Vault Services (PCI-DSS & GDPR): - Architected and developed a centralized, socket-based Data Vault Service in core Java to securely handle sensitive financial data (PAN, PIN, CVC, addresses, customer info) using HSM-integrated cryptography. - Implemented robust tokenization, masking, and encryption strategies to meet stringent PCI-DSS and GDPR requirements. - Unified data protection mechanisms across backend microservices, customer-facing portals, internal analytics systems, and batch processes. - Enabled secure onboarding of new merchants and partners by streamlining sensitive data handling workflows, improving compliance audit readiness by 100%.
Virtual University of PakistanTeaching Consultant
Jun. 2002 - Oct. 2008
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