Mostafa A.

Three years ago a US real-estate AI startup hired me on Upwork as a virtual assistant for $7 an hour. Today I'm their Product Manager, reporting to the CEO, and I've written more of their backend than anyone else in the company's history. Same company, same contract: $7 to $10 to $12 an hour, 4,500+ logged hours, all in my work history below. That's the honest version of what I do. I start where a company needs help, learn what the problem needs, and end up owning the outcome. What that looks like now: • I write the specs and then I often build them. Our valuation model, our comps engine, our rental estimates, our Zillow data scraper: I built those. 492 commits and 119 pull requests on the backend, second place on the React frontend. • AI products end to end: an automated valuation model, a computer-vision condition pipeline, and Sage, an AI analyst that takes a budget and a plain-English brief and comes back with ranked deals. I own the product, wrote its UI, and run its tracing and cost monitoring. We also shipped an MCP connector so the same analysis runs from Claude or ChatGPT. • Paid features shipped from nothing: skip tracing, renovation cost breakdown, solar and roof analysis, mortgage and lien data, plus a custom comps API for one client and a Google Sheets pipeline for another. • Infrastructure and money: my AWS cost report found $1,500 a month of waste, and I planned and coordinated the move to a cheaper provider with no downtime. • Process that survives me: incident response and post-mortems (about 18 in 2026), testing-first deploys, weekly delivery cadence. My degree is in electronics engineering (Cairo University). I read and write production Python and TypeScript, query production databases, and hold my own in architecture discussions. What I am not is a full-time engineer for hire. My job is making sure what your developers build is the right thing, and building it myself when that's faster. Good fit if you're a founder or a small team that needs someone to turn "here's what I want" into shipped product: scoping, specs, dev handoff, delivery, and the Saturday incident when something breaks. I respond within a few hours and I prefer long-term work. The history below shows what that looks like.