Issa Al-Halabi·Al Khobar, Saudi Arabia
Senior Software Engineer·7+ years
Building reliable systems that scale.
Deep backend expertise and strong software architecture capabilities, designing cloud-native distributed systems that remain scalable, observable, and maintainable in production.
Node.js · TypeScript · AWS · Kubernetes · Event-Driven Systems · Observability
Engineering that scales with the business.
Senior Software Engineer with 7+ years designing and operating backend and distributed systems across fintech, e-commerce, AI, IoT, EdTech, and Web3.
I lead architecture decisions, improve reliability and observability, raise developer productivity, and help teams ship faster.
Seven years building systems and leading teams.
- Led architecture of a multi-tenant e-commerce platform running on AWS EKS.
- Integrated payment, IoT, logistics and banking services through 40+ integrations.
- Designed observability and reliability using Grafana.
- Improved engineering productivity through AI-assisted workflows.
- Reduced infrastructure costs and operational overhead.
- Delivered 7 microservices powering an RWA marketplace across 6 blockchain networks.
- Designed event-driven services and asynchronous blockchain workflows.
- Reduced Docker image sizes by 90% and CI/CD execution times by 50%.
- Executed a zero-downtime AWS account migration across 12 services.
- Lowered developer overhead by 30% through reusable packages and automation.
- Led a team of 5 engineers and mentored 3 developers across mobile, web, and backend.
- Designed a microservices platform on APISIX with unified auth across 8+ identity providers (Keycloak).
- Built IoT messaging infrastructure on RabbitMQ, enabling real-time operations across 100+ bikes and 300+ battery stations.
- Accelerated deployments by 30% and strengthened security through Kubernetes and CI/CD.
- Developed and maintained 10+ Node.js microservices across fintech and IoT.
- Improved database performance by 40% through schema optimization and migrations.
- Delivered a mobile banking application and integrated 5+ payment gateways.
- Improved reliability through containerized deployments and real-time services.
- Improved engineering practices through mentoring and reusable platform standards.
- Delivered 10+ web applications and custom platforms (PHP, JavaScript, MySQL, REST).
- Built backend services, reusable components, and API integrations.
- Translated business requirements into scalable solutions.
- Led small project teams to on-time delivery.
Impact, in numbers.
A few outcomes I'm proud of — real, measured wins from shipping systems at scale.
Smaller Docker images — and 50% faster CI/CD pipelines
Onboarding time cut through AI-assisted workflows
Faster release cycles through automation and CI/CD
Database performance gained through schema optimization
Manual operations reduced through platform redesign
Infrastructure cost reduced on a multi-tenant platform
How I make decisions.
The beliefs that survive contact with production.
01Simplicity
Prefer boring technology that scales. Simplicity is a feature.
02Reliability
Systems should fail gracefully. Optimize for uptime and maintainability.
03Observability
Metrics, traces, and logs are first-class concerns. You can't operate what you can't see.
04Business Impact
Technical decisions exist to create leverage. Optimize for outcomes instead of perfection.
Technologies I build with.
Backend
Typed, tested services and APIs — the core of what I build.
Cloud & Infrastructure
Provisioning and running platforms reliably on AWS.
Data & Messaging
Durable state and event flow — fast and consistent.
Architecture
Keeping complex systems debuggable as they grow.
Quality & Operations
Shipping safely and seeing what production is doing.
Applied AI
Putting LLMs to work in real engineering workflows.
Let's talk.
Open to senior engineering roles, architecture leadership and interesting technical challenges across fintech, e-commerce, AI, IoT, EdTech and Web3.
I read every one. Typical reply within 24 hours.