$ cd ~/journey

Journey

From computer science fundamentals to building AI products — the path, the turns, and what I learned along the way.

  1. Feb 2026 — Present

    Senior AI Product Engineer

    TalentPop · Costa Mesa, CA (Remote)

    • ▸ Own the end-to-end product lifecycle — discovery through delivery — for a US-based SaaS team supporting e-commerce client operations.
    • ▸ Drive API, data, and backend engineering for scalable, reliable system architecture.
    • ▸ Manage AWS deployment & infrastructure (EC2, Lambda, RDS), optimizing for performance and cost.
    • ▸ Spearhead AI-assisted development workflows, integrating LLM and automation tooling to accelerate team velocity.
    • Python
    • AWS
    • EC2
    • Lambda
    • RDS
    • LLMs
    • SaaS

  2. Jan 2025 — Present

    Product Manager

    NotAi · United Arab Emirates

    • ▸ Lead the full product lifecycle for AI-powered e-commerce and SaaS solutions, ideation to launch.
    • ▸ Built autonomous AI agents for Shopify — automating recommendations and upsells, boosting conversion 18%.
    • ▸ Delivered an LLM integration platform unifying three enterprise models behind one RBAC interface (+40% adoption).
    • ▸ Run Agile delivery: sprint planning, backlog grooming, retrospectives.
    • AWS SageMaker
    • Python
    • NLP
    • Shopify API
    • Agentic AI
    • REST APIs

  3. Aug 2023 — Dec 2024

    Junior Product Manager

    NotAi · United Arab Emirates

    • ▸ Directed AI/ML product strategy for e-commerce automation: fraud detection, chatbots, recommendation engines.
    • ▸ Authored PRDs, user stories, and acceptance criteria to guide engineering execution.
    • ▸ Implemented bias detection & model performance testing pipelines for AI deployments.
    • Python
    • TensorFlow
    • Scikit-learn
    • AWS AI Services

  4. 2023

    The turn: software → AI products

    From building apps to building intelligence

    • ▸ After years shipping mobile fintech and e-commerce systems, moved into AI/ML product — bringing an engineer's rigor to product decisions.

  5. Sep 2019 — Jul 2023

    Founding Engineer

    Zapp · Karachi, Pakistan

    • ▸ Helped build the Zapp super app (consumer, merchant, and driver modules) serving 100K+ users.
    • ▸ Built real-time driver dispatch with Google Maps SDK and WebSockets.
    • ▸ Developed merchant tools for inventory, orders, and analytics; cut load time by 1.8s via API optimization.
    • Kotlin
    • Android SDK
    • Google Maps SDK
    • WebSockets
    • Firebase

  6. Sep 2019 — Jul 2023

    Senior Software Engineer

    P3 Financial Group · Karachi, Pakistan

    • ▸ Built the Soneri digital banking app — secure login, OTP, transaction management — with PCI-DSS-compliant security.
    • ▸ Shipped the My Jubilee insurance app for digital policy management.
    • ▸ Cut crash rate 35% via profiling and memory optimization; set up CI/CD with fastlane.
    • Kotlin
    • Android SDK
    • Retrofit
    • Firebase
    • Jenkins
    • MVVM

  7. Sep 2018 — Aug 2019

    Software Engineer

    P3 Financial Group · Karachi, Pakistan

    • ▸ Delivered mobile modules for fintech and e-commerce in multi-brand environments.
    • ▸ Integrated payment gateways and notification services; deployed on PAX-certified EMV POS devices (A920, E500).
    • Kotlin
    • Java
    • Android SDK
    • Retrofit

  8. 2020 — 2022

    M.S., Software Project Management

    National University of Computer & Emerging Sciences (FAST)

    • ▸ Master's in software project management.

  9. 2014 — 2018

    B.S., Computer Science

    National University of Computer & Emerging Sciences (FAST)

    • ▸ Foundations in algorithms, systems, and software engineering.