PepWell
A mobile benefits application that gives PepsiCo employees a single place to discover and redeem the benefits negotiated for them.
- Laravel 11
- MySQL
- React Native
- Expo
- React
- Tailwind CSS
Loading…
Ahmed Salama
Technical Lead · Senior Software Engineer · AI Systems · Consultant & Mentor
I bridge product, business, engineering and quality.
Seven years of building and shipping software across nine engagements, the last over three years leading teams and delivery. I work the whole lifecycle: requirements and backlog, architecture and build, LLM and AI-agent integration, QA and release. I consult and mentor on all of it, so nothing is lost between what the business asked for and what production actually runs.
Capabilities and stack
- Product Ownership
- Project Management
- Business Analysis
- Quality Engineering
- Software Architecture
- System Design
- AI Integration
- LLMs & AI Agents
- AI Orchestration
- Team Leadership
- Mobile Development
- Agile Delivery
- Cloud & DevOps
Career at a glance
7+ years
Since August 2019
3 yrs
Since October 2023
100,000+
Transportation platforms, current role
9
Egypt · Sweden · Remote
4
PostgreSQL · MySQL · MongoDB · Oracle
What I do
Technical leadership across the whole lifecycle, so requirements, delivery, engineering and quality stay one accountable thread instead of hand-offs.
Product & Delivery
Owning what gets built and when: shaping the backlog against business goals, planning sprints and releases, and keeping stakeholders, engineers and deadlines pointed at the same outcome.
Business Analysis
Turning ambiguous asks into buildable requirements by mapping the process, writing user stories with acceptance criteria, and carrying them through to UAT so what ships is what was asked for.
Quality Engineering
Treating quality as a plan rather than a phase: test planning weighted by risk, manual and API testing, regression coverage, and the review standards that stop defects earlier than any test run.
Engineering Leadership
Managing cross-functional teams, running delivery execution and technical operations, mentoring engineers and holding code quality across the team.
Selected work
Al-Ouf Transportation System
The in-house platform of one of Egypt’s largest transport operators, carrying 100,000 to 200,000 daily active users across five live surfaces for major corporates and schools.
- Laravel 12
- Laravel Octane
- Laravel Reverb
- PostgreSQL
- Redis
- Firebase
Real Deal
An automotive platform that is both the reference and the market: official specifications and prices for every model, and dealer-to-dealer, dealer-to-customer and customer-to-customer trade at fixed prices or under a live auction clock.
- Laravel
- Laravel Octane
- MySQL
- Flutter
- Next.js
- OAuth
Edge Innovation Center
A workspace platform where a confirmed booking is the authorisation that opens a physical door.
- Laravel
- Laravel Octane
- PostgreSQL
- Redis
- Next.js
- Flutter
Each of these is full-time work I was on from start to finish, published where confidentiality allows. Freelance and consulting engagements are not included.
Experience
Technical Lead
Leading engineering across architecture, technical strategy, product development and delivery, on transportation platforms that carry six-figure daily traffic.
What the work involved
- Led architecture and engineering for transportation platforms supporting 100,000+ daily users across multiple applications and operational dashboards.
- Designed backend and distributed-system architectures for high-volume workflows: real-time operations, tracking, reservations and corporate transportation management.
- Led development across web, mobile, backend, cloud infrastructure and administration platforms.
- Improved performance and reliability through caching, database optimisation, infrastructure work, load testing, monitoring and production tuning.
- Designed and delivered integrations with payment gateways, authentication providers, enterprise platforms, cloud services and third-party APIs.
- Introduced AI and LLM capabilities: LLM integrations, intelligent automation, RAG workflows, AI agents and AI-assisted product experiences.
- Established engineering practice around architecture, code quality, technical review, development standards and production readiness.
- Mentored engineers on system design, architecture, debugging, performance optimisation and engineering practice.
- PHP
- JavaScript
- TypeScript
- Python
- SQL
- Laravel
- Node.js
- Express.js
- NestJS
- REST APIs
- GraphQL
- OAuth
Technical Operations Manager
Continuing part-time engagement with WardLin after the full-time team lead role, covering technical operations and staff management.
What the work involved
- Manage technical staff and team operations on a continuing part-time basis.
- PHP
- JavaScript
- TypeScript
- Python
- Laravel
- Node.js
- Express.js
- NestJS
- REST APIs
- GraphQL
- RabbitMQ
- Microservices
Software Engineering Team Lead
Led end-to-end development across multiple products for a Sweden-based team, with production ownership covering reliability, security and release engineering.
What the work involved
- Led end-to-end development across multiple products, focused on scalability, reliability and performance.
- Managed technical operations and cross-functional engineering teams.
- Drove system architecture decisions with senior stakeholders and other Tech Leads.
- Owned production systems for reliability, security and operational efficiency.
- Designed and implemented CI/CD pipelines for fast, reliable, automated releases.
- Architected and maintained cloud-based solutions on AWS.
- Ran delivery execution, release planning and operational workflows.
- Mentored engineers, enforced code quality standards and promoted engineering best practice.
- PHP
- JavaScript
- TypeScript
- Python
- SQL
- Laravel
- Node.js
- Express.js
- NestJS
- REST APIs
- GraphQL
- OAuth
Senior Software Engineer · Senior Full Stack Developer
Drove end-to-end delivery and modernised legacy systems, with unusually broad database exposure: relational and document engines side by side in one role.
What the work involved
- Drove end-to-end delivery with a focus on robustness, scalability and user-centric design.
- Built backend systems in PHP and Laravel, with Node.js and Express.js for server-side services.
- Designed and optimised high-performance data across MySQL, PostgreSQL, MongoDB and Oracle.
- Built front-end interfaces with TypeScript, JavaScript, React and Material UI.
- Implemented CI/CD pipelines for reliable deployment, and modernised legacy systems.
- Built cloud solutions on AWS, working in Agile iterations with cross-functional teams.
- Worked directly with product and business teams to keep solutions user-centric.
- PHP
- JavaScript
- TypeScript
- SQL
- Laravel
- Node.js
- Express.js
- NestJS
- REST APIs
- GraphQL
- OAuth
- RabbitMQ
How I architect
Almost every system is a variation on one shape. Knowing the default is what makes a deviation from it a decision rather than an accident.
Read this diagram as text
- User
- A browser or a mobile app. Everything downstream exists to answer one of these as quickly as it can.
- CDN
- Serves static assets and cacheable responses from a location near the user. Every request it absorbs is one your infrastructure never pays for.
- API Gateway
- One entry point: routing, authentication, rate limiting and request shaping. It is where cross-cutting concerns live so services do not each reimplement them.
- Application
- Where the business rules live, whether that is one deployable or fifteen. This is the part worth designing carefully; the rest is plumbing around it.
- Cache
- Holds the results of expensive work so it is done once instead of every request. Fast, and the source of most stale-data bugs.
- Queue
- Work the user does not need to wait for: email, reports, thumbnails, sync to a third party. It moves latency out of the request instead of removing it.
- Workers
- Consume queued jobs on their own schedule, and scale independently of the traffic that produced them.
- Database
- The source of truth, and usually the hardest thing to scale: it is the one component that cannot simply be duplicated without deciding what consistency means.
- Third parties
- Payments, identity, messaging, maps. Systems you do not control, cannot fix, and must design around failing.
- User → CDN (static + cacheable)
- User → API Gateway (API request)
- API Gateway → Application (routed, authenticated)
- Application → Cache (read first)
- Application → Database (read / write)
- Application → Queue (defer work)
- Queue → Workers (consume)
- Workers → Database (write back)
- Workers → Third parties (call out)
Where next
Two kinds of conversation start here: hiring for a role, or bringing in technical help.
Hiring for a role?
Open to technical leadership, product delivery and senior engineering roles. The full history is on the experience page, and the résumé is available as a PDF.
Need technical help?
Architecture, technical review, engineering leadership and AI. Engagements run as remote consulting, contract and project-based work.
Let’s talk
Have a product, platform or delivery challenge? Let’s talk about turning it into a structured, scalable solution.
Open to technical leadership, product delivery and senior engineering roles, and available for architecture consulting, technical reviews and mentorship. Engagements run as project-based work, contracts, consulting, freelance engagements, remote collaboration and long-term partnerships.
Based in Cairo, Egypt, working remotely with clients across the MENA region and internationally.