Muhammad Ali A.

I've 10 years of experience developing software,, specializing in Node.js, TypeScript, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, and backend architecture. I work best when the problem is important, the solution isn't obvious, and someone needs to take ownership. Selected results: - PostgreSQL dashboard (Node.js, Prisma, GraphQL): load time went from about 15s to about 2s after I added materialized views, pre-aggregated the campaign and lead metrics, and rewrote the main queries. Client review: "provided a perfect solution to speed up our software's performance times." - AWS Lambda ticket scraper: the old Puppeteer scraper ran one site after another, took about 5 minutes and often failed before finishing. I replaced it with Axios and Cheerio and ran the work concurrently. Runtime went from 5 minutes to 15 seconds. Client review: "made it run nearly 20X faster!" - MongoDB time-series reporting: two weeks of data held 26.6 million records. A chart query took about 53s locally and timed out on the server, because the app downloaded all the data and calculated charts in Python. With aggregation pipelines and pre-computed collections, chart queries ran in about 1 second. How I work: 1. Reproduce the slow or failing path and record a baseline (timings, query plans, logs). 2. Find the root cause: query shape, missing indexes or pre-aggregation, work that runs one step at a time when it could run in parallel, or too much data moving into the app. 3. Ship the smallest fix that solves it, measure again, and give you a short before-and-after note. Other production work: - Traced a production Apple Pay failure on Stripe to an async call after the button click that broke the browser's user-gesture rule, and fixed it. - Built AI lead qualification with OpenAI, Grok and LangChain: each applicant gets a score from 1 to 4, and the backend routes them through HubSpot to the right next step. - HubSpot, Stripe and webhook integrations, Redis/BullMQ job queues. Background: software development experience since 2014. Most recently a full-time engagement with a Toptal client (May 2023 to September 2026), first as full-stack developer, then technical team lead. Before that, full-stack developer at Spindox in Turin. Master's degree in Computer Engineering from Politecnico di Torino. Stack: Node.js, TypeScript, Express, Fastify, NestJS, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Prisma, Redis/BullMQ, AWS (Lambda), Google Cloud, Docker. Based in Turin, Italy, and I work in English. If part of your backend is slow or failing, send me a message or invite me to your job. Include the symptoms, your stack and what you have already tried, and I'll tell you what I would check first.