Current
What I do now
Electronic First sells digital goods: game keys, gift cards and top-ups. I joined in 2017, rebuilt the platform from WordPress to Laravel in 2019 and have led engineering since 2021. The platform serves 2M visitors and nearly 100M requests a month on AWS.
- Role
- Lead Software Engineer
- Company
- Electronic First
- Since
- 2017lead since Jan 2021
- Where
- Remote. Employer based in Fujairah, UAE.
Team
- Lead a 9-person engineering team, 6 in Bangladesh and 3 in India.
- Code review, architecture calls and security reviews go through me.
- Weekly leadership sync in English with senior management in the UK and UAE.
Production AWS
- Own the AWS account end to end for 6+ years: EC2 behind ELB with Auto Scaling Groups, EKS, RDS Multi-AZ with RDS Proxy, S3, SQS, SES, ECR. Cloudflare in front.
- Deploys run through GitHub Actions. CodeDeploy for the EC2 fleet, Argo CD for EKS. Infra is Terraform.
- Cost first. Logs go to S3 and ClickHouse instead of a bigger RDS. Hot paths sit in Redis. Query tuning keeps instance sizes small.
Go services on EKS
- Built and run 20+ Go microservices, many replacing slow Laravel cron jobs.
- Merchant Center Feeds keeps ~520K product entries in sync with Google. Queries per sync went from ~2M to ~240.
- Provider Price Sync checks 4 supplier APIs every 5 minutes and routes each SKU to the cheapest one.
- Product Feeds Generator ships affiliate XML feeds to 200+ partners every 10 minutes.
Security
- Set up and tune Cloudflare WAF. It has absorbed multi-million-hit bot and DDoS waves.
- Run my own pentests on the platform. Found and fixed cart session hijacking and missing rate limits on forgot-password and heavy endpoints.
- Harden both the AWS side and the Laravel apps. CEH v12 course completed.
AI
- Designed and shipped Pulse, an internal AI agent on OpenAI's tool-use API. Business users ask questions in Discord and get live data from internal APIs.
- TypeScript, Node 22+, typed tools per capability, adapter pattern. Discord live, Telegram and WhatsApp planned.
- Next: evals, tracing and cost per request on the same agent. Progress on the AI learning page.
Across teams
- Work with ads, marketing and customer support on what they need from the platform.
- Built the Google Merchant API integration for the ads team.
- Built auto-shipping for low-value, low-risk orders. About 60% of orders now ship with no human in the loop.
Application code
- Laravel and NestJS on the backend, Next.js on the frontend, some Blade in older pages.
- Performance work is ongoing: N+1 fixes across the Laravel codebase, caching and query-level tuning.
- Peak database CPU dropped from 99% to 45% after that tuning.
Daily stack
- Laravel
- NestJS
- Next.js
- Go
- Python
- MySQL
- PostgreSQL
- Redis
- ClickHouse
- AWS EC2
- AWS EKS
- CodeDeploy
- Argo CD
- Terraform
- Cloudflare
- OpenAI tool-use