Taking on one or two new projects
Full-Stack Software Engineer · Lahore, Pakistan (UTC+5 · overlaps EU & US mornings)
Two years shipping revenue-critical systems, plus 14 freelance engagements on top. I connect storefronts to the services they run on: gift-card providers, payment gateways, identity verification, schedulers. Then I make sure the webhooks, retries and edge cases still behave once real money moves through them.
Currently an Associate Software Engineer at i2c Inc., a global payments and banking platform. I freelance selectively alongside it.
Built at, studied at, and integrated with
Services
Six things I've actually shipped and been paid for, not a list of everything I've read about.
Connecting Salla and Zid stores to the providers behind them. Catalogue sync, product-to-SKU mapping, webhook-driven order fulfilment, and provider fallback for when one supplier goes down. I've built this end to end twice.
Stripe one-time checkout and PayPal recurring billing, with dynamically created products and monthly or yearly plans. I also handle the part nobody budgets for, like entitlement, retries and reconciliation.
The unglamorous work that saves a team days every month. Consume a vendor's webhooks, pull the data, flatten two very different API shapes into one, then file the result where it belongs. Wiring Veriff KYC into SharePoint cut manual processing by about 60%.
Multi-tenant applications with real tenant isolation, role-based access control down to resource level, audit logging, and dashboards that load fast enough to actually get used.
Taking an app that works but hurts, and making it maintainable. Struts/JSP to React, PHP to Svelte, CodeIgniter revamps. On one React app I got the bundle from 1.89 MB down to 800 KB, which pulled CI builds from 30 minutes to 5.
Live chat, presence, collaborative canvases and instant notifications over Socket.IO. Everything is room-based, so broadcast cost scales with the room rather than your whole user base.
Featured work
Open any one for the architecture, the integrations and real screenshots of the running product.
Client work
Fourteen engagements for ten clients since 2024. Here's a representative slice. Most were fixed-scope jobs delivered inside a fortnight.
Integrated Cal.com so clients could book against real availability, with the conferencing option chosen per booking (Google Meet, Zoom, Microsoft Teams). Added Stripe for one-time payment processing.
Replaced the existing editor in a Laravel + Inertia + React marketplace with Slate, handling HTML serialisation and deserialisation both ways so the PHP backend kept receiving plain HTML strings, plus auto-resize and a toolbar matched to the app's theme.
“I was very impressed with the work done by Ali… I can recommend and will use this freelancer again in the future.” Client review, 5.0★. This client rehired me twice afterwards.
Joined an existing bilingual school-management and ERP platform to clear functional defects across timetable management, student grading, teacher workflows and real-time chat.
Reworked a legacy surveyor platform's interface and form flow. The client measured a 40% lift in user-satisfaction scores and a 25% drop in form-submission errors afterwards.
Built a Laravel app where staff clock their own time and an admin edits records and manages accounts. Start/stop timekeeping, per-user access, admin overrides.
“Excellent Laravel Developer.” Client review, 5.0★
Migrated a legacy PHP interface to Svelte with DaisyUI and Tailwind, and made targeted enhancements inside an older React class-component codebase without a rewrite.
Built Python workflows with Selenium and BeautifulSoup to pull structured data from several sites and process it into a usable shape for downstream systems.
Implemented full multi-page Tailwind UI templates (home, pricing, about, blog, post, login) inside a live Laravel + Inertia + React application, matching the existing architecture rather than bolting on a second one.
“Did excellent job of the work. Completed quickly and first time round.” Client review, 5.0★
Client reviews
Unedited reviews from my Upwork profile, where you can verify every one of them yourself.
★★★★★
“I was very impressed with the work done by Ali. Work was done to a high standard and he has good skills which he showed through code and delivery of work. He has good communication skills and is quick to respond to any messages. I can recommend and will use this freelancer again in the future.”
↻ This client came back and hired me twice more.
★★★★★
“Very good freelancer. Easy to communicate and work with. Did excellent job of work.”
★★★★★
“Did excellent job of the work. Completed quickly and first time round.”
★★★★★
“Excellent Laravel Developer.”
Endorsements clients selected for me: Committed to Quality ×4, Clear Communicator ×2, Reliable, Collaborative.
Stack
Things I've used on real, shipped work, in rough order of how much I'd back myself on them.
How I work
The part most portfolios skip, and the part clients ask about first.
I'd rather push back on a vague brief than discover the misunderstanding at delivery. You get a written scope, the assumptions I'm making, and what's explicitly out.
Short written updates on what moved, what's blocked, and what I need from you. Four clients have endorsed me for Committed to Quality and two for Clear Communicator, and I'd like to keep it that way.
On integration and legacy work I match the conventions already there instead of importing my own. Your team shouldn't be able to tell which files were mine.
Setup and environment notes, what I'd do next, and the trade-offs I took knowingly. No surprises left in the repo.
About
I'm a software engineer in Lahore, Pakistan, with a Software Engineering degree from NUST. By day I'm an Associate Software Engineer at i2c Inc., a global payments and banking platform, where I work on a customer-service application used by live support agents. I've been migrating legacy Struts/JSP screens to React over Spring Boot and Hibernate services, wiring Kafka-based integrations between telephony and AI systems, and building a multithreaded batch pipeline that processes 2.2 million financial records.
Before that I was at PureLogics, where I built a reusable MERN boilerplate with resource-level role-based access control and audit logging, shipped a PayPal-backed subscription system for a learning platform, and took a React app's bundle from 1.89 MB to 800 KB, which pulled CI builds from 30 minutes down to 5.
Alongside that I've freelanced since May 2024: 14 engagements, 10 clients, 373 hours, a 5.00 average rating. Most of it has been integration work: plugging one system into another and making the seam invisible. Along the way I've ended up specialising in Salla and Zid, the two platforms most GCC e-commerce runs on. It's a narrow niche and a useful one. I've built gift-card fulfilment and customer-verification products on both.
I'm a good fit for the integration nobody wants to own, the payment flow that has to be right, or the legacy app that needs rescuing rather than rewriting. If your project needs deep native mobile work, ML research or heavy DevOps, I'm honestly not your first call.
Next step
Send me the brief, even a rough one. I'll come back the same working day with whether I'm a fit, what I'd tackle first, and an honest estimate. If I'm not the right person I'll tell you.
Use Upwork if you can. You get escrow, a contract and my full review history. Email works fine for everything else.
Multi-tenant SaaS · Live in production
Gift-card fulfilment middleware sitting between Salla/Zid storefronts and wholesale gift-card providers.
A store sells a digital gift card. Kodati picks the order up the moment the webhook lands, chooses the provider that can fulfil it most profitably, buys the code and delivers it to the customer. Nobody touches an admin panel. Stores that were fulfilling orders by hand stop doing that entirely.
The live app is behind a merchant login, so the screenshots on the right are the fastest way to see it. Happy to give you a walkthrough on a call.
Merchant dashboard (Salla)
Statistics
Product categories
Products, grid view
Products, list view
Orders (merchant)
Product-to-SKU linking
Order settings (merchant)
Email templates
Categories (admin)
Products (admin)
Orders (admin)
Stores (admin)
Settings
Login
Multi-tenant SaaS · Live in production
A shared customer-reputation layer for Salla and Zid merchants. Track, rate and verify a customer before you fulfil their order.
Merchants selling on Salla and Zid carry real risk on orders they haven't been paid for yet. Tawthiq gives them a record for each customer, covering history, ratings and verification state, so a merchant can decide before shipping rather than after a loss. Each merchant sees their own data; admins see the platform.
Merchant dashboard
Admin dashboard
A merchant's customers
Customer profile
Statistics (admin)
Storefront script snippets (admin)
Login
Integration service · Source on GitHub
An unattended pipeline that turns Veriff identity-verification decisions into filed, auditable records in SharePoint.
Compliance teams were pulling verification reports and ID media out of Veriff by hand and filing them into SharePoint. This service does the whole loop itself: a decision arrives, the session and its media are fetched, packaged and uploaded to the right place, every time. It cut manual processing time by around 60%.
This one's open source. If you'd rather judge how I write code than how I describe it, start here.
Service architecture and data flow
Real-time engineering · Personal project
A Skribbl.io-style drawing game, built as an excuse to get a WebSocket architecture right. These are the same primitives behind live chat, presence and collaborative editing.
A lot of the work clients bring me is "add live chat", "show me who else is online", "let two people edit this at once". Those all come down to the same questions: who owns the state, what gets broadcast to whom, and what happens when someone's connection drops mid-action. A live multiplayer game is the most honest way to show I can answer them.
Listed as a personal project, not client work. It's here for the architecture, not the game.
Player setup
Word selection
Live canvas and chat
Round in progress
Drawing tools, colours
Room and players
Scoring
Drawing tools, brush sizes
Correct guess