Selected Works

Built the architecture and engineering backbone for a new Open Finance channel under compressed regulatory timelines and changing downstream specifications.

The first release covered account-data sharing and payment initiation. It passed CBUAE certification and reached Friends & Family. I then handed over a self-sufficient development team, with a permanent global technical lead in place, to delivery management, and the product later moved to production. This cleared the regulatory gateway for further products and services under the bank's Open Finance initiative.

Joined a flagship retail payments programme for the bank's Pakistan launch when it was already around two months behind, with about one month left before SIT. Reduced the expected SIT delay from around two months to two weeks while delivering new features as planned.

The programme progressed, and after several months I handed over a self-sufficient development team to a permanent global technical lead. The solution reached production with my support, and the same solution was later adapted with minimal changes for SME payments.

Owned the Databricks Digital Twins rollout proposed by technical leadership. My plan and estimates showed it would add roughly four months to the remaining MVP timeline. I proposed a significantly simpler solution that covered the same requirements. This solution was adopted.

The migration was postponed and the remaining MVP forecast fell from roughly six months to roughly two. Reaching MVP was required before the company could approach investors for further funding.

Reviewed database reliability after a major production outage that disrupted the banking application for roughly two days and led to regulatory consequences.

The review produced a remediation backlog for the responsible squads, and its implementation reduced the recurring serious database incidents rate.

It also exposed broader configuration and architecture problems across the platform. I designed a long-term architecture improvement plan, which the product team accepted as the basis for future development.

Led technical delivery for a major digital transformation involving 45+ technical people across the client, Tinext and contractor teams.

During final QA of the first MVP, working with the client's technical stakeholders, my engineers reporting to me found that the core systems team had decommissioned the endpoints our architecture and product were built against. Delivery was interrupted.

The client paused the channel build and reset the programme sequence rather than keep investing in a delivery plan that could not succeed until the underlying platform transformation was resolved.

Investigated a major performance escalation raised by Etisalat Egypt during Friends & Family testing, with fragmented partner evidence and practical limitations on gathering performance data from environments emulating production.

Working from internal logs and Google Analytics, I showed that the reported issue was a consequence of customer behaviour rather than a platform performance limitation. The partner accepted the report and closed the escalation.

While adding new features to the monitoring system, I found that the existing observability tools gave fragmented coverage, with insufficient information about the services and limited ability to support existing clients.

I owned the redesign of the monitoring solution and treated it as an internal product that had to meet the requirements of several teams.

The new telemetry exposed an ingestion bottleneck, infrastructure failures and serious building and device data-quality problems. It also showed that one of the proposed MVP buildings did not produce usable data, which shifted the MVP focus to a building whose devices provided better-quality data.

Led the technical presales work for a digital transformation spanning six new customer and partner touchpoints for one of Saudi Arabia's largest insurers.

The target architecture and technical delivery approach became part of the proposal signed off by the client.

Leading an architecture decision for a new regulatory payments capability: how much to reuse from an existing product, and where operational separation is needed.

Work is in progress — the architecture and ownership decision is being finalised before implementation proceeds.

Led the architecture design for a new Real-Time Payments capability integrating the bank with an external wallet provider.

Adapted the fintech's configurable integration to the bank's requirements: different destinations require different customer data, and changes to outbound data can require privacy, compliance and internal approval.

The architecture is complete and the product is in the final stages of development.

Visited a major offshore vendor site (100+ engineers) to assess deliver bottlenecks and identify the changes needed to resolve them. Developed internal recommendations on process and documentation improvements based on what the teams reported.

The vendor adopted the onboarding material as a standard part of onboarding for new engineers, and several of the wider recommendations were subsequently taken forward.

Built a bytecode-generation library for the JVM Specification workstream within Oracle's Java Compatibility Kit.

Deep conformance testing required deliberately malformed or specification-invalid bytecode, which until then meant substantial manual bytecode or pseudo-assembler work. This pulled the team away from its core responsibility of analysing the JVMS and proposing changes to it, and the resulting coverage was not deep enough for the range of cases and potential issues involved in certifying a JVM.

The new library increased assertion-coverage throughput by about 5× and average test cases per assertion by about 53×, and my assigned work raised overall JVMS coverage by 47% relative to the starting level.

Led technical delivery for a major digital transformation across Tinext, the client and contractor teams.

The platform went live and was handed over for ongoing operation. It later became the base for additional customer-facing journeys.

Led the integration of seven free-zone organisations joining a UAE government platform as part of its first expansion phase.

All seven integrations reached production and began processing live service requests through the platform.

Defined a viable phased upgrade plan, the required resources and the technology choices, while minimising delivery cost and migration risk. The main challenges were upgrading through several major versions and preserving existing data through multiple format changes.

The phased upgrade architecture, resource plan and technology choices were included in the proposal signed by the client, and were later passed to another team for implementation.

Self-initiated an engineering knowledge and onboarding system for a large digital organisation where important architecture and process knowledge was fragmented.

The material continues to be used and shared during onboarding and day-to-day work and is updated as the underlying systems change.

Designed the architecture for a new Wage Protection System capability in the SME payments product, integrating with government WPS infrastructure. The engineers implementing it were new to the bank and to the banking domain.

One of the main goals was to deliver the capability with higher code quality, maintainability and reliability than the surrounding product.

The SME Payments squad implemented the architecture under my guidance and delivered the WPS capability to production.

The data-gathering implementation was performing unusually poorly, with a significant delay between HVAC device data arriving and being written to the database.

I assessed the design of the solution and redesigned it. Removing the bottleneck reduced data-ingestion lag by approximately 95%.

Built an internal workflow tool for our JVM Specification team to manage thousands of testable assertions across changing specification versions.

The tool became the team's standard working environment for specification review and test-coverage work.