Salman Mustafa

Engineering leader with 12+ years building backend systems and 5+ years leading engineering teams in high-growth fintech. Previously led a cross-functional team of 10 engineers at MoneyLion, owning payments and transaction-authorization systems for a platform serving 2M+ users and processing $350M+ in quarterly transactions. Strong JVM background (Java/Spring Boot), Kotlin-adaptable, with deep experience across distributed systems, Kafka, PostgreSQL, and AWS Kubernetes infrastructure at scale.

Track record of scaling teams (5→10 engineers), building structured hiring pipelines, and institutionalizing SLA/SLO and incident-response practices. Comfortable operating at the intersection of technical depth, people leadership, and cross-functional stakeholder management, with exposure to SOC 2 and GDPR compliance contexts in a regulated fintech environment.

Team Lead (Acting Engineering Manager) at MoneyLion Sdn Bhd (2021-08 – 2026-06)

• Owned day-to-day leadership of a cross-functional team of 10 engineers (backend, mobile, QA) — running 1:1s, performance review cycles, hiring, and onboarding.
• Built the team's hiring process end-to-end: job scoping, structured interview loops, and offer calibration, scaling headcount from 5 to 10 engineers in 18 months.
• Owned backend engineering for revenue-critical systems supporting user onboarding, payments, and transaction authorization on a platform serving 2M+ users and processing $350M+ in quarterly transactions.
• Collaborated with the SRE team to architect auto-scaling AWS Kubernetes infrastructure that absorbed 3M+ user sign-ups during a viral growth campaign with zero service degradation; designed idempotency and circuit-breaker patterns to ensure payment reliability at peak load.
• Defined and executed a microservices modernization roadmap, reducing deployment and maintenance overhead by ~30%.
• Established SLA/SLO frameworks and on-call rotation with Datadog and PagerDuty, reducing mean time to detection (MTTD) and improving system reliability.
• Built data pipeline integrations feeding the ML team's fraud-detection models, contributing to a ~$60K net fraud-recovery gain and a ~25% improvement in dispute recovery.
• Maintained direct stakeholder communication with US-based product and executive teams, translating technical trade-offs into business impact for non-technical audiences, with consistent OKR alignment.
• Led the migration and optimization of user funding velocity limits, enabling higher deposit throughput while maintaining risk controls.
• Designed and built a production AI agent (dual-model architecture: primary LLM for task execution, guardrail model for safety) automating engineering workflows — test analysis, workflow re-triggering, root-cause identification, and PR generation from Jira tickets. Used daily by 30–40 engineers, PMs, and QAs.

Senior Software Engineer at Vettons Sdn Bhd (2020-06 – 2021-07)

• Developed e-commerce backend systems on AWS Serverless (Lambda, DynamoDB, API Gateway, SQS), reducing cold-start latency by 35%.
• Designed microservice-based APIs supporting vendor onboarding and order processing for a verified product marketplace.

Lead Developer at Siroi Solutions (2018-04 – 2020-05)

• Led multi-country engineering teams (Malaysia, India, UK) delivering risk-management, shipping, and telecoms solutions on Node.js, MongoDB, and AWS.

Team Lead at Locopixel (Pvt.) Limited (2016-09 – 2018-03)

• Led engineering teams delivering full-stack e-commerce and community-management platforms on AWS using Node.js, Angular, and Express.

Bachelor of Science in Computer Science – FUUAST