Ahmed Ismail

Product-minded Senior Full-Stack Engineer and Technical Lead with over a decade of experience owning complex features end-to-end across modern web products and high-throughput services. Based in Porto, Portugal, I engage internationally via my B2B LLC, providing reliable overlap with US and EU time zones.
• Modern Web & AI: Building real-time and AI-powered experiences using React, Next.js, Node.js, langchain and NestJS
• Data & Scale: Custom search relevance with Elasticsearch, high-throughput messaging with Kafka, and advanced data modeling in Postgres and TimescaleDB.
• Infrastructure & Quality: Ensuring strict performance budgets and reliability through GitOps (FluxCD), IaC (Pulumi, Terraform), Kubernetes, and comprehensive automated testing.
• Observability: Building systems that provide and observable state for easy debugging, recovery and monitoring using tools such as Grafana, Loki, Jaeger, Prometheus, OpenTelemetry and sentry. Enabling data driven decisions
• Product Insights: Providing valuable and actionable product usage insights using tools such as posthog and exporting valuable usage insights from applications. I have also leveraged posthog for A/B testing, conditionally rolling out features and feature flags.
• Building Realtime UIs: Using SSE and websockets and optimizing for low time to first byte and good p95 targets (monitored via observability tools and tested with stress testing tools such as artillery) to provide realtime dashboards and other UIs.
• Profiling and Performance Debugging: Experienced with SQL query tuning, navigating application traces and profiling hot paths. I have also created various caching strategies for applications to improve performance and leveraged tools such as ElasticSearch to provide optimized indexes for complex queries.
• Security minded: input validation, authz boundaries, sensible rate limits, rotating secrets and following best practice guidelines such as those recommended by OWASP