Open to full-stack, backend & architecture roles

Zeeshan Mahmood

Software Architect & Full-Stack Engineer · Backend & distributed systems

Software architect and full-stack engineer with 8 years of experience, from IoT platforms and microservices serving 50K+ users to a full cross-platform marketplace built end to end. Strongest on the backend and distributed systems, and comfortable across the stack and on mobile.

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About

Background

Over the past eight years I've worked across the stack, but my home is on the backend: distributed systems, microservices, event-driven architectures, and the observability and CI/CD tooling that keeps them healthy. I've led migrations, cut incident recovery times, and built platforms that scale.

I've shipped in Go, Node.js/NestJS, and TypeScript on AWS, with Kafka for event streaming and Dynatrace, New Relic, and Sentry for observability. More recently I've architected and built full products end to end, like a cross-platform Flutter app with a Supabase/Postgres backend and Stripe Connect payments. I still enjoy the engineering-leadership side too: authoring RFCs, running product-readiness reviews, mentoring teammates, and raising the bar on quality and delivery speed.

I'm pursuing a Master of Applied Computing at Wilfrid Laurier University (2025 to 2026) and hold a Bachelor of Mechatronics Engineering from NUST CEME. I'm based in Brantford, Ontario.

Based in
ON, Canada
Focus
Backend · Distributed systems · Platform
Currently
Software Architect & Consultant @ Stealth Startup

Career

Experience

  1. Software Architect & Consultant

    Stealth Startup · Ontario, Canada

    May 2026 – Present
    • Architected and shipped a peer-to-peer marketplace solo in 2 months, now in active beta with 200+ testers: a cross-platform Flutter app and web admin portal on Supabase using Clean Architecture and Riverpod.
    • Designed a Stripe Connect payments system (authorize-and-capture escrow, deposit holds, seller payouts, automated dispute settlement) on serverless edge functions and webhooks, removing manual payout and dispute handling.
    • Built a real-time location-tracking and safety platform (Flutter, Firebase, Google Maps) with an event-driven geofencing pipeline that sends push alerts and escalates unacknowledged ones.
    • Enforced multi-tenant data isolation with Postgres row-level security and Firestore RBAC rules (zero cross-tenant access in security tests), and set up TDD and CI gates across unit, widget, integration and end-to-end tests.
    • Isolated third-party SDKs behind provider-agnostic interfaces, so database and auth swaps needed no UI changes.
    • Flutter
    • Supabase
    • PostgreSQL
    • Firebase
    • Stripe Connect
    • Clean Architecture
    • Serverless
    • Multi-tenancy
    • TDD

  2. Senior Software Engineer

    Careem · Islamabad, Pakistan

    Jul 2024 – Apr 2026
    • Scaled an IoT platform by integrating 1000+ smart mobility vehicles from two vendors into Go microservices over TCP with IMEI-based connection validation.
    • Cut MTTR by 40% by migrating observability to Dynatrace, sped up responses by 25% by tuning slow database queries, and reduced IoT update latency by 10% by moving to Kafka events.
    • Reduced financial losses by ~20% with a backend pre-authorization workflow, and delivered geo-fencing across the backend and the Next.js operations portal to meet regulatory requirements.
    • Designed for graceful degradation over full failure and led incident response, cutting outage recovery time by 35% through staged rollouts, RFCs, Product Readiness Reviews and incident documentation.
    • Raised the team's test coverage standard to 90%, shipped 5+ operations portal features, resolved 20+ critical bugs, and mentored and onboarded new engineers.
    • Go
    • Java
    • Spring Boot
    • Kafka
    • Microservices
    • IoT
    • Dynatrace
    • Next.js
    • Incident response
    • Feature flags
    • TDD

  3. Senior Software Engineer

    Fiber Mountain · Islamabad, Pakistan

    Sep 2022 – Jul 2024
    • Devised and executed an automation strategy on AWS and GitHub Actions, establishing efficient build pipelines and cutting packaging time ~15%.
    • Introduced coding standards across 6+ projects (linting, pre-commit hooks, sanity builds, contribution guidelines, TDD), reducing 50+ code smells and lifting coverage ~30%.
    • Translated product requirements into RFCs and allocated work across the team, improving efficiency and reducing feature development time.
    • Led the transition from a synchronous system architecture to an events-based framework, improving real-time data update speed ~15%.
    • Migrated Git repositories from legacy on-prem systems to GitHub with sanity pipelines, branch protection, and code-owner configurations.
    • Event-driven architecture
    • AWS
    • GitHub Actions
    • CI/CD
    • TDD
    • RFCs
    • Mentoring

  4. Senior Software Engineer

    Retailo · Islamabad, Pakistan

    Oct 2021 – Sep 2022
    • Transitioned 5+ monolithic modules to microservices, improving API response time ~25%.
    • Led the revamp of core infrastructure services (authorization, configuration) to support a fast-growing user base of 50K+.
    • Rebuilt the authentication mechanism and shipped a private NPM auth utility via GitLab CI/CD, adopted across 15+ backend services.
    • Standardized logging and internal API documentation, cutting cloud costs 15%+, and designed a custom architecture for distributed transactions across microservices.
    • Integrated system monitoring (New Relic, Sentry) for deeper insight into bottlenecks and service crashes.
    • Node.js
    • Microservices
    • Distributed transactions
    • GitLab CI/CD
    • New Relic
    • Sentry
    • Authorization

  5. Software Engineer II

    Xgrid · Islamabad, Pakistan

    Jan 2019 – Sep 2021
    • Used service workers to move data processing to the background, boosting UI performance ~20%.
    • Developed and maintained the frontend for a scalable system handling large data volumes with Angular v8, REST APIs, and WebSockets.
    • Built serverless APIs with Auth0 authentication using AWS Lambda and API Gateway.
    • Angular
    • WebSockets
    • REST APIs
    • AWS Lambda
    • API Gateway
    • Auth0
    • Service workers

Toolkit

Skills & technologies

Languages

  • Go
  • TypeScript
  • JavaScript
  • Dart
  • Java
  • Bash

Backend

  • Node.js
  • NestJS
  • Spring Boot
  • Microservices
  • REST APIs
  • WebSockets
  • Event-Driven Architecture
  • System Design
  • Clean Architecture

Frontend & Mobile

  • React
  • Next.js
  • Angular
  • Flutter
  • Riverpod

Cloud & Data

  • AWS
  • Firebase
  • Supabase
  • PostgreSQL
  • Kafka
  • Stripe Connect

DevOps & CI/CD

  • GitHub Actions
  • GitLab CI/CD
  • Git
  • Linux
  • TDD
  • CI/CD

Observability

  • Dynatrace
  • New Relic
  • Sentry

Ways of working

  • Agile
  • RFCs
  • Documentation
  • Mentoring

Contact

Get in touch

The fastest way to reach me is email. Happy to talk about backend, distributed systems, or a role.

hello@offthemainthread.com LinkedIn GitHub

ON, Canada