Abdullah Arshad

Senior Backend Developer with 5+ years delivering high-scale, production-grade systems for international companies. Deep expertise in Node.js, NestJS, Python, Django, Flask, and FastAPI – building clean APIs, microservices, and automated content pipelines. Architects LLM failover systems (OpenAI, Claude, Gemini, Together AI) with cost tracking and circuit breakers, RAG retrieval, LangChain pipelines, and agentic task orchestration; also experienced in web scraping, NLP, and data analysis (Pandas, NumPy, Scikit-Learn) for AI-powered applications.

Recent impact: scaled content generation to 1,000+ articles/batch, cut audit failures from 24k to near-zero, reduced DKN generation time by 75%, cut payroll processing by 60%, cut API response times by 40%, and automated away 80% of manual processing. 900+ commits across enterprise SaaS.

Senior Software Engineer - Search Atlas - USA (Remote)

(2024-01)

AI-powered SEO SaaS platform – 40+ tools, high-traffic multi-tenant architecture

• Designed and built LLMWithFailover, a cross-provider LLM abstraction layer with Redis-backed circuit breakers, exponential backoff, and health checks – zero downtime across OpenAI, Claude, and Gemini outages.
• Scaled bulk AI content generation from 50 to 1,000+ articles/batch: parallelised topical map processing, tuned Celery staggering (3s → 0.5s), added watchdog recovery tasks.
• Reduced on-page audit failures from 24,000+ to near-zero (7 root causes, automated recovery, Slack alerts); cut AI-driven DKN generation time by 75% via parallelisation and isolated retry/backoff queues.
• Owned Brand Vault, a RAG-powered enterprise knowledge base end-to-end: soft-delete/archive, audit logging, bulk parallel GCS uploads via Celery group tasks, vector-based retrieval.
• Built 6+ CMS connectors (WordPress, Salesforce, Drupal, Ghost, Craft CMS, BigCommerce, Cloudflare Pages) with automated error recovery, slug-conflict detection, and hero image deduplication.
• Implemented LLM cost tracking and Pyroscope profiling; redesigned Celery queue architecture, cutting scan overhead from 38 queues to single-queue lookups.

Senior Software Engineer - HAMAH - Riyadh, Saudi Arabia (Remote)

(2024-11)

AI-powered media & storyboard content generation platform

• Conceptualised and built the complete infrastructure, backend, and database schema for the Storyboard AI app from scratch (Python/Django + Node.js), with complex relational schemas for hierarchical media assets across multiple user roles.
• Delivered v1 and v2 within 3 months – two-column script export to PDF, ZIP archive generation, presentation-ready outputs, and a content planning system with APIs for nested content items.
• Architected an extensible content management framework (diverse media types, attachments, validation rules) with metadata handling and relational mapping across channels, mediums, and asset types.
• Built a multi-provider LLM content generation system (OpenAI GPT, Claude, Gemini, Together AI) using LangChain for automated article creation, categorisation, and SEO optimisation – 90% content-quality accuracy.
• Built a voice/audio generation system using the ElevenLabs API for multi-language voice-over generation, plus a content optimisation engine running automated A/B tests across LLM providers to tune quality, speed, and cost, with an analytics dashboard tracking provider performance and multi-format (PDF/HTML/Markdown) output.
• Established GitLab CI/CD with Dockerised deployments for zero-downtime releases.

Backend Software Engineer - Quest – Hire a Hero - Singapore (Remote)

(2024-04 - 2024-11)

On-demand talent marketplace platform

• Built a smart notification engine (Node.js/Python, RabbitMQ, cron) for real-time push notifications, plus email templates via Amazon SES; added testing, logging, error handling, and Swagger docs.
• Applied machine learning to optimise notification timing and content personalisation based on user engagement patterns.
• Created a custom Golang logger for backend/frontend; designed and optimised database tables for performance and scalability.
• Refactored a monolith into modular architecture (services/controllers/routers) and delivered a full PostgreSQL-backed integration/unit test suite on GitLab CI.

Backend Software Engineer - Paismo HR - Lahore, Pakistan

(2023-09 - 2024-04)

HR, payroll, and biometric management SaaS

• Built a full payroll disbursement system in NestJS (RabbitMQ, Easypaisa API, automated audit reporting) – reduced processing time by 60%; applied PostgreSQL optimisation and Redis caching for real-time calculations.
• Wrote a cross-platform Node.js SDK for ZKTeco biometric integration (Linux/macOS/Windows) with automated background sync.
• Designed a flexible policies/holidays configuration engine and custom scheduler, plus cron jobs automating timesheet validation – backed by a full Jest unit test suite.
• Built Python-based automated reconciliation (Pandas transaction matching, cutting manual processing time by 80%) and OpenAI-powered transaction analysis for anomaly detection and natural-language compliance summaries.

Developer Advocate - Educative.io - Lahore, Pakistan

(2021-10 - 2023-09)

Online coding education platform serving millions of developers

• Resolved technical blockers for the team/external authors across Node.js, Django, and Flask; led Python/Django course development covering ORM optimisation and REST API design.
• Created two production-quality Golang backend courses on APIs, performance, and clean code.
• Developed Python automation tools and Django apps for course-content validation, using Pandas/NumPy for engagement analytics.
• Set up and optimised Docker configs across Android, Flutter, Python, Node.js, Jenkins, TigerGraph, and Neo4j – cutting container startup from 5 min to under 2 min; deployed on AWS EC2/EKS with GitHub Actions/GitLab CI/BitBucket CI/CD.
• Worked across Linux distros (Ubuntu, Alpine), SQL/NoSQL (incl. Cassandra), and Kotlin for Android/backend – plus Python, C, C++, Data Structures, and OS fundamentals.

BS - Computer Science - University of Central Punjab (2017-01 - 2021-12)