// Founding Engineer & CTO — Available for hire
Muhammad
Ali Rasheed
I've spent 4+ years as the founding engineer behind a live automotive marketplace — owning the platform across 222K lines of code, 9 repositories, and 4 business pivots, all shipped remotely from Karachi. Before that, I spent 7 years managing enterprise network infrastructure at one of Saudi Arabia's busiest airports. I build systems that survive the real world.
About
The full story, no filter.
I'm a full-stack engineer and technical founder based in Karachi. Since 2021, I've been CarmateKH's founding engineer, and today I serve as CTO, owning the entire technical platform: backend, frontend, mobile, DevOps, SEO, observability, and product roadmap. I work closely with two co-founders through regular sprint syncs and a shared Jira board. As the team expanded, 3 additional developers joined at different stages; I onboarded each one, reviewed their pull requests, and kept the architecture consistent across the codebase. All code goes through a PR-based review workflow on GitHub, and architecture decisions are documented in markdown before implementation.
Before software, I spent 7 years as a network engineer at King Abdulaziz International Airport in Jeddah — managing mission-critical Cisco infrastructure, running change-management processes across teams, mentoring junior engineers on escalation procedures and troubleshooting methodology, and conducting blameless post-incident reviews when outages occurred. That background shaped how I think about reliability, failure modes, and building systems that don't break at 2 AM.
I also founded Curious Packet, a US-registered e-commerce consultancy, where I led a team of 4, including a UI designer, a frontend developer, and a content specialist, while architecting the platform and engineering the full backend. I ran design reviews, defined component specs, reviewed every pull request, and made the call on every architectural trade-off. I understand product, not just code.
BEng in Telecommunications Engineering. Infrastructure-aware by nature, product-obsessed by choice.
Network Engineer
King Abdulaziz International Airport, Jeddah — 7 years managing mission-critical enterprise infrastructure. Led change management, mentored junior engineers, conducted blameless post-incident reviews, and authored technical documentation including BOQs, compliance statements, and method statements.
Founded Curious Packet
US LLC + SECP Pakistan. E-commerce consultancy turned product company with a proprietary Shopify-alternative engine.
Joined Carmate as Founding Engineer
Inherited a fragmented legacy codebase. Began the full v2 rewrite — backend, frontends, infrastructure — from scratch.
PropertyMap
Joined a 7-person team as full-stack developer. 100 commits across 2 repos in 4 months. Shipped duplicate detection, map experience, and valuation API.
Became Full-Time CTO
Expanded into full-time technical leadership, owning strategy, product roadmap, and platform architecture at Carmate.
Open to Next Chapter
Seeking a founding engineer or staff-level role where full-platform ownership is the expectation — not the exception.
Work
Selected projects
CarmateKH
Cambodia's automotive marketplace. 9 repositories, 4 frontends, 54 database models, 4 language localisations, a native ad server, a live auction engine, and a B2B SaaS portal for OEM brands. Built and maintained as the founding engineer, remotely from Karachi.
Four Pivots. One Platform.
Engineering Workflow
All code goes through a PR-based review workflow on GitHub, with no direct pushes to main. As Carmate grew, 3 additional developers joined at different stages for frontend and backend support. I onboarded each one, reviewed their PRs, and kept the architecture consistent across the codebase. Architecture decisions are documented in markdown before implementation. I stay in close sync with the co-founders on priorities and trade-offs, use Jira for sprint planning and task tracking, and feed Sentry, New Relic, custom error pipelines, and uptime monitoring back into architecture decisions.
PropertyMap
Real estate valuation platform for Cambodia. Joined mid-project on a 7-person cross-functional team spanning backend, frontend, design, and product. I shipped 100 commits across 2 repos, with 7+ pull requests reviewed and merged in 4 months. Largest refactor: 502 insertions, 2,224 deletions, and a net reduction of 1,722 lines — a reminder that the best engineering often means less code, not more.
CP Core Template
Proprietary Shopify-alternative platform engine. I led a team of 4, working with a UI designer, a frontend developer, and a content specialist while architecting the platform and engineering the full backend and infrastructure. I ran design reviews, defined component specs, reviewed every pull request before merge, and made the call on every architectural trade-off. The result was a platform engine that launches new client stores about 70% faster than a from-scratch build.
Stack
What I work with
// Frontend
// Backend
// DevOps & Infra
// Observability
How I Work
I build for the long term, not the demo.
Every architecture decision I make starts with one question: what happens when this breaks at scale? My background in enterprise network infrastructure — where a single misconfigured switch could ground flights — trained me to think in failure modes, redundancy, and feedback loops before writing the first line of code.
01 /
Reliability by design, not by accident.
At CarmateKH, I built a full observability stack — Sentry error tracking, New Relic APM, custom error pipelines, and uptime monitoring — not as an afterthought, but as a core architectural layer. When the auction engine's business contract collapsed, the infrastructure I'd built survived intact and now powers features across the platform. Systems should outlive their original assumptions. I monitor error rates, API response times, and uptime metrics continuously — and feed that data back into architecture decisions. At the airport, this same loop existed in network monitoring: detect degradation, trace the root cause, fix it, document it, and update the runbook so it never happens the same way twice.
02 /
Code quality as a non-negotiable.
Every line of production code goes through a PR-based review workflow on GitHub — no direct pushes to main, no exceptions. Architecture decisions are written up as markdown specification documents before implementation begins, reviewed against requirements, and stored in the repo as living documentation. When I joined PropertyMap's 7-person team, I followed the same discipline: 7+ pull requests were reviewed and merged in 4 months, and my largest refactor consolidated two forms into one with 502 insertions, 2,224 deletions, with a net reduction of 1,722 lines. At Curious Packet, I reviewed every pull request from the frontend developer, ran design reviews with the UI designer, and defined component specs to keep the team aligned. Quality isn't something I bolt on at the end — it's how I work from the first commit.
03 /
Collaboration across the stack.
Being the primary engineer doesn't mean working in isolation. At CarmateKH, 3 additional developers joined at different stages to support frontend and backend work. I onboarded each one, reviewed their pull requests, and maintained architectural consistency while they contributed. I stay in close sync with the co-founders on priorities and trade-offs, use Jira for sprint planning and task tracking, and have worked on cross-functional teams — including a 7-person squad at PropertyMap spanning backend, frontend, design, and product. At the airport, I coordinated with operations teams, vendors, and junior engineers across 24/7 mission-critical infrastructure — running change-management processes, writing method statements, and leading blameless post-incident reviews after network outages.
04 /
Quality over speed, always.
When I joined CarmateKH, I inherited a fragmented legacy codebase. The faster path was to patch it. I chose the harder one: a full v2 rewrite across all nine repositories. That decision cost months upfront but gave us a platform that has survived four complete business pivots without a single architectural rewrite. I recently completed an API centralisation refactor — migrating every frontend API call to a clean lib/api architecture with domain-owned endpoints, SSR orchestration, and normalised error handling — and deleted the entire legacy compatibility layer because every consumer was already migrated. I will always choose the longer-term, higher-quality solution over a quick hack, because I've seen what happens when you don't.
Services
How I can help
01 /
Full-Stack Web Application
End-to-end product development. From database schema and API architecture to frontend and deployment pipeline. I build things that scale and survive business pivots.
Starting $5,00002 /
E-commerce Platform Build
Custom storefronts, admin dashboards, headless CMS integration, payment pipelines, and analytics. Purpose-built for your business — not adapted from a template.
Starting $4,00003 /
CTO-as-a-Service
Technical strategy, architecture reviews, team setup, infrastructure design, and product roadmapping for early-stage startups that need senior engineering leadership without a full-time hire.
From $150 / hrContact
Let's build something real.
I care about building things that last — for users, for teams, and for the engineers who inherit the codebase after me. I'd rather spend an extra week on the right architecture than ship a shortcut I'll regret in six months.
I'm currently evaluating new opportunities — both full-time remote roles and freelance projects. If you need an engineer who has actually shipped a platform end-to-end, I'd like to talk.