Muhammad Naveed Akram

• Founded and run 16xBrains — a boutique practice giving founders and product teams the senior technical voice they need long before they can justify the salary: architecture ownership, engineering governance, and MVP acceleration.
• Parachute into stalled or fast-scaling codebases to untangle architecture, set technical direction, and get delivery moving again — usually as the only senior engineer in the room, and usually part-time.
• Own the calls a founding team cannot safely outsource to a vendor: technology selection, build-versus-buy, cost and feasibility modeling, and the sequencing that decides what gets built first.
• Set the technical bar for engineering hires, run the interviews, and give the reasoned no — so teams end up with the right people rather than the available ones.
• Stay hands-on by design. Every recommendation is one I would have to implement myself, which is the constraint that keeps the advice honest.

• Architected and delivered core systems across a six-year education-platform engagement — multi-tenant assessment, content intelligence, and AI-assisted authoring — owning backend and frontend paths, partner integration, system design, testing and DevOps alongside product, data-science and engineering teammates.
• Designed a configuration-driven multi-tenant platform where a new partner organisation is expressed as mappings and metadata rather than a source fork, with tenant-scoped modules, locales, branding, access rules and callback behaviour.
• Built the partner integration contract — tenant-bound credentials, signed and freshness-checked requests, duplicate protection, asynchronous signed result delivery with bounded retry and inspectable delivery state.
• Held scoring deterministic and versioned so a submission replays to the same result, and kept the probabilistic work in authoring and content analysis where a person reviews the variation before it counts.
• Implemented end-to-end encryption for sensitive institutional and minor-user data — identity-linked records inside a key-scoped envelope, protected credential transport, and a de-identified analytics store that was never joined to a person.
• Delivered a human-in-the-loop content-intelligence pipeline — document extraction, semantic mapping against a versioned standards hierarchy, reviewer correction, and coverage and gap reporting as versioned evidence.
• Built constrained AI programme generation: briefs normalised, standards retrieved and filtered deterministically, a typed outline validated before per-session content generation fanned out across durable, recoverable jobs.
• Owned DevOps for the estate — containerised services, automated dev and staging deployment, and CI/CD — with a deliberately lean team.

Stack — Node.js · Express · React · Python · FastAPI · MongoDB · Redis · Object Storage · End-to-End Encryption · Docker · CI/CD

◈ constrained learning program generator ⟶◈ content intelligence certification ⟶◈ adaptive assessment platform ⟶

• Four months on the engineering team of a European luxury-resale marketplace, working on backend services inside a large, high-traffic production estate.

• Conceived, architected, and led OneX — a Platform-as-a-Service that lets developers, designers, and non-technical users assemble, re-skin, and ship native iOS / Android / PWA apps from templates, with reusable service integrations and a roadmap toward full visual programming.
• Designed OneX's backbone: a flexible headless CMS and data-configuration layer paired with a granular access-control system — engineered so both visual and functional changes stay robust across every app generated on the platform.
• Owned the product vision end to end — built and recruited the engineering team, set delivery direction, and worked as both architect and hands-on product engineer.
• One of three architects safeguarding code quality across the wider platform, authoring the solution documents behind every critical change and leading system-design cleanups and future-proofing R&D with feasibility, time, and cost assessments.
• Pioneered Node.js and React / React Native adoption alongside a legacy PHP (Symfony, Yii) and Python-Flask estate on MySQL, MongoDB, and Elasticsearch, and advanced the migration toward microservices.

Stack — Node.js · React · React Native · PHP Symfony/Yii · Python/Flask · MySQL · MongoDB · Elasticsearch

◈ app generation paas ⟶

• Solo-architected and built a construction takeoff & cost/material estimation product (comparable to STACK) end to end — technology selection through MVP — delivering it in 12 months at 15–20 hrs/week.
• Built the backend and full AWS DevOps for a social mobile game that scaled to 5M+ registered users and 80K daily actives, keeping it stable under sustained load.
• Designed Crawler-as-a-Service, an automated web-data-extraction product, from concept through working prototype.
• Delivered on-demand full-stack consulting across Python, JavaScript, and AWS for a range of clients.

Stack — React · Redux · Node.js · HTML Canvas · Python · Django · Electron · Webpack · AWS Serverless

◈ construction takeoff estimating ⟶◈ social game backend scale ⟶

• Set the technical vision and strategic direction for a full-lifecycle software company, owning the product and client technology roadmap.
• Ran all DevOps and AWS infrastructure — EC2, Lambda, RDS, IAM, SES, S3, Route 53, ELB, CodeCommit — across in-house and client work.
• Mentored junior developers, sharpening their problem-solving and moving teams onto a modern React / Node.js / React Native stack.

Stack — AWS · React · Node.js · React Native · Linux

• Built goPay from scratch — an intelligent payment gateway that routes each transaction across providers using a financial-decision matrix — shipping the core services, three dashboards (admin, finance, developer), and Android + Unity SDKs.
• Coded all backend services and supervised the front-end and mobile developers delivering against them.
• Earlier built game-server backends on Java / Struts with AWS EC2 and RDS.

Stack — Python · Django · RabbitMQ · Celery · Nginx · AWS EC2/RDS/DynamoDB/CloudFront

◈ payment routing engine ⟶

• Architected and owned Django backends for a themable mobile game, a live cricket-scoring platform in the vein of CricInfo — later merged into CricinGif — and a mini-CMS serving content across a range of mobile apps.
• Built a full-featured multi-tenant SaaS for schools and colleges, including a college-builder and single-click subdomain creation with fully automated server setup, plus a Rails-based OLX/eBay-style marketplace.
• Delivered four REST-API backends on Google App Engine, and ran all of the company's AWS operations — gunicorn/Nginx deployments, Supervisor process control, Celery + Redis async pipelines, and cron scheduling.

Stack — Python · Django · Rails · PostgreSQL · MySQL · Redis · Celery · Nginx · GAE · AWS

◈ multi tenant provisioning ⟶

• Built server-side logic for mobile social games — mostly on Google App Engine — for one of the region's established mobile social-gaming companies.
• Deployed to DeNA's Tokyo office for 3–4 months, shipping two projects on the Java Play framework: a REST API for a 3D mobile game with social, PvP, and events modules, and NFL-Matchups, an HTML5 server-side game that stayed among Japan's top-grossing apps for a long run.
• Worked on DeNA / ngmoco's closed-source Ng-Core gaming engine over Node.js, still trademarked under Mobage.

Stack — Java Play · Google App Engine · Node.js Ng-Core · REST APIs

• Sole technology developer for a major telemarketing client — owned the database and built and automated the client reporting the account ran on.
• Automated manual processes with .NET services on the client's server machines, cutting human dependency while lifting throughput and accuracy, and turned around quick solutions as new requirements landed.

Stack — C#.NET · VB.NET · SQL Server

• GPA 3.33 / 4.00 — awarded a full merit scholarship covering tuition and residence for all four years.
• Teaching Assistant for the Introduction to Computer Programming lab (2007), responsible for grading.
• Won a speed-programming competition against 50 teams (2009).