Get in touch

I build backend, data and AI systems that work reliably in production

Senior engineer with ~10 years in Python and React. I've kept 140+ microservices healthy for a 40M-learner platform, built the pipelines behind a 500k-company investment database, and shipped RAG and agentic workflows to production.

Top 3% Talent on ToptalTop Rated Plus on Upwork

Get in touchView résumé
OSS Research AgentBasis Set Ventures · Scheduled
  1. 01 · SourcesFast-growing open-source repos
    • Growth signals
    • Launch posts
  2. 02 · GatesQuality & stage filters
    • Startup-fit check
    • Funding-stage check
  3. 03 · Agent tool loopClaude researches each repo
    • Claude
    • Web search
    • Web fetch
  4. 04 · AnalyzeMarket, competition, code quality
    • GitHub API
    • Contributors
    • Traction
  5. 05 · VerdictScored recommendation
    • HTML report
    • Email digest
shipping software for real users
10 yrs
microservices maintained at edX
140+
companies tracked by my pipelines
500k+
founder profiles enriched
2M+

Shipped for

  • Basis Set Ventures
  • edX
  • Wanderu
  • Stack Builders
  • Arbisoft
  • Vital Interaction
01Selected work

Systems I built, owned and kept running

Three in depth, plus smaller projects alongside them.

Basis Set Ventures 2022 – 2026 · Senior Data & Software Engineer

The pipelines and workflows behind a venture firm's deal flow

Over nearly four years I built the scheduled pipelines and AI workflows the firm's investors use to find, enrich and evaluate companies. I also proposed moving the main product to FastAPI and React, which our three-person team rebuilt together.

  • Designed and built the founder-enrichment pipeline: scraping, verification and logging at every stage.
  • Built and ran the firm's scheduled workflows on Airflow and Argo, from LLM founder scoring to stealth-founder discovery. The main ones are listed below.
  • Added RAG and agentic workflows for deal evaluation and categorization, and replaced form-based search with full-text search.
edX via Arbisoft · Senior Software Engineer

Keeping edX's platform healthy at scale

Partnered directly with edX's engineering manager on a distributed learning platform where a bad deploy reaches millions of learners.

  • Owned dependency upgrades, CI/CD changes, deprecations and security patches across services.
  • Became the go-to engineer for deploys and upgrades, catching risks before they reached learners.
  • Delivered features and fixes, independently and inside larger teams.
Wanderu via Arbisoft · Integrations team

Rail, bus and ferry integrations, from search to payment

Built and maintained the partner integrations for a travel booking marketplace. Every partner had its own API, data model and failure modes.

  • Led full integrations (search, booking and card payments) for Deutsche Bahn, Trenitalia, RailEasy and others.
  • Built station matching across providers with geolocation and maps APIs.
  • Reviewed the team's code and onboarded junior engineers.

Also shipped

02Production systems

30+ scheduled workflows I ran at Basis Set

I built them, ran them, and got the alert when they broke. Here are the main ones.

AI agents & LLM systems

  • Founder-scoring eval loop

    An LLM scores founders against versioned prompts, which are refined regularly against an eval set built from investor feedback.

    • LLMs
    • Evals
    • scikit-learn

  • Founder classification

    Structured-output LLM classification that keeps the deal feed clean.

    • BAML
    • PostgreSQL

  • GitHub repo categorization

    A recurring LLM pass over tracked open-source projects that flags the ones that look like startups.

    • BAML
    • Claude

Founder & company discovery

  • Founder-company linking

    Tiered fallback across multiple data sources to link founders to their companies, with staging tables and an audit log of every attempt.

    • Python
    • PostgreSQL

  • Similar-company alerts

    Embeddings in pgvector match new companies against priority deals and send the closest matches as a regular alert.

    • pgvector
    • Embeddings

  • Stealth-founder discovery

    Surfaces founders before they announce their company, delivered as a regular digest.

    • Python
    • Slack

  • Social momentum signals

    Watches public social activity for early momentum around companies and founders. Each alert comes with an LLM-written founder analysis.

    • Python
    • LLMs

Signals & automation

  • Investor network mapping

    Maps the team's professional networks to find warm intro paths, with reminders to ask for intros.

    • Python
    • Slack

  • Outreach & intro automation

    LLM parsing of intro and outreach emails into the CRM, with automated replies and link-click tracking.

    • BAML
    • Email APIs

  • Traction snapshots

    Regular snapshots of developer, community and web-traffic signals, with alerts when growth picks up.

    • Python
    • PostgreSQL

  • Research automation

    A pipeline that searches academic literature on the themes the firm is researching.

    • Python
    • APIs
03Services

Ways I can help

Pick what your team needs: an engineer embedded in your stack, a product built from scratch, or AI features your users actually touch.

  1. 01

    Backend & data platforms

    APIs, data pipelines and the services around them. Python, Django and FastAPI, Airflow jobs, and scraping and enrichment at scale, built to run without babysitting.

    Discuss a backend build
  2. 02

    Applied AI in production

    Agentic workflows, RAG pipelines and LLM features with OpenAI and Claude, connected to your data and measured against real outcomes.

    Talk about an AI feature
  3. 03

    Full-stack product builds

    From data model to React UI to deploy. I take on the whole build, keep the scope realistic, and hand over code your team can maintain.

    Start a project
04Experience

Ten years, four companies, one thread

Systems that hold up under real load — backend first, frontend when the job calls for it.

  1. Basis Set VenturesMay 2022 – Mar 20263 yrs 11 mos

    Senior Data & Software Engineer

  2. Stack BuildersOct 2021 – Apr 20227 mos

    Senior Software Engineer

  3. ArbisoftJan 2018 – Nov 20213 yrs 11 mos

    Senior Software Engineer

  4. QC TechnologiesNov 2016 – Jan 20181 yr 3 mos

    Software Engineer

05Testimonials

Trusted by the people I worked with

Unedited recommendations, copied from LinkedIn.

Read on LinkedIn ↗

I worked with Zulqarnain for almost two years on assorted development projects at edX. He ramped up enough to be productive very quickly, and successfully tackled a wide array of new feature development, bug fixes, and maintenance work both on his own and as part of a larger team. I miss his assistance, but am confident he'll be similarly valuable in his future endeavors.

Jeremy BowmanSenior Manager of Software Engineering · edXMay 2022

I was Zulqarnain's project manager while he was working in Stack Builders. Zulqarnain is a great team player and a quick learner. He was able to provide value to the project in a short time frame. He is proactive and responsible for the work delivered. He will be a great addition to any team/organization.

Carlos Romero MartinezProject Manager / Business Analyst · Stack BuildersMar 2022

Zulqarnain was a member of Wanderu's integration team. Over his 2 years on the team, Zulqarnain contributed a wide range of fixes and improvements to our partner code. Additionally, he lead many key integration efforts for Wanderu. It was also great to see him work with more junior team members to help them get up and running. He also provided code review and pull request feedback to ensure all contributions by the team were high quality. I'm sure he will be a great addition to any and all teams in the future.

Matthew WarrenDirector of Engineering · WanderuJan 2020

I had the pleasure of working with Muhammad Zulqarnain at QC Technologies. He has very good problem-solving skills. He can learn and switch quickly on different parts of the projects e.g. backend, frontend etc. I believe he'd be a great asset for any organization.

Muhammad Umer MassodSenior Software Engineer (Python) · QC TechnologiesOct 2019
06Toolkit

What I work with

Backend

  • Python
  • Django
  • FastAPI
  • Flask
  • Scrapy

Frontend

  • JavaScript
  • TypeScript
  • ReactJS
  • Next.js

AI / LLM

  • RAG
  • Agentic workflows
  • Vector databases
  • Embeddings
  • OpenAI API
  • Claude Agent SDK
  • Claude MCP
  • Claude Skills
  • BAML
  • LLM evals

Data / ETL

  • Apache Airflow
  • Argo Workflows
  • pgvector
  • Celery
  • Redis
  • Selenium
  • PostgreSQL
  • MongoDB
  • MySQL

Cloud / Infra

  • AWS (EC2, S3, RDS, Lambda)
  • Docker
  • Kubernetes
  • Jenkins
  • GoCD
  • GitHub Actions

Other

  • GraphQL
  • SQLAlchemy
  • SendGrid
  • Airtable API
Education
BS(H) Software Engineering (2012 – 2016)
University of Punjab, Lahore
Certifications
AWS Cloud Developer Nanodegree (2021)
Udacity
React Nanodegree (2021)
Udacity
07Get in touch

Working on a full-stack or AI problem?

Tell me what you're building and what's getting in the way. I'll reply with how I'd approach it, usually within a few hours.

Email me
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