I started as a software developer in 2004, building whatever a project genuinely needed — desktop finance tools, real-time 3D visualizations, adaptive video streaming, instant messaging. That range early on taught me that the technology is always in service of a business problem, never the point in itself.

Over time, that hands-on foundation turned into technical leadership. I moved from writing the backend of a gaming platform to directing the engineering, support, and operations teams behind Open Banking platforms serving banks and FinTech companies across Iran — and later into architecture roles shaping public-sector fleet management and airport operations systems in the UAE.

My approach to architecture is deliberately unglamorous: understand what the business is actually trying to do, design service boundaries and data flows that a team can maintain without me in the room, and make the reasoning behind those decisions explicit enough that someone else can pick them up later. I care about systems holding up in production far more than how they look in a design document.

On the team side, I’ve hired, mentored, and reviewed the work of engineers across every one of these roles. The teams I’ve led have ranged from a handful of developers standing up a new platform to established groups modernizing legacy systems — in both cases, the job is the same: give people clear ownership, raise the bar on code quality through review rather than mandate, and remove the ambiguity that slows delivery down.

Today I work independently, advising founders and engineering leaders on architecture, technical due diligence, AI-enabled software delivery, and delivery leadership — the same problems, applied to a wider set of teams.