01Fintech2024
Russend
Remittance app moving money from Russia into Central African mobile wallets.
Express.jsNode.jsMongoDBPaydunya APISocket.IO
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Dhaka, BangladeshFintech & Trade Finance Systems
AL SHAKIB E ELAHI
Building software that survives production.
Trade finance, payment rails and the services underneath them, where an edge case is somebody's rent.
Selected workTrade Finance
I build the parts of a product that cannot fail quietly. Trade finance messaging, payment rails, the reconciliation job nobody sees. Most of the work is deciding what happens when something breaks - because it will, and the answer should already be written down.
- Projects delivered end to end
- 100+Projects delivered end to end
- Years shipping systems into production
- 3+Years shipping systems into production
- Banks running trade finance software I build
- 2Banks running trade finance software I build
- Countries reached through integrated payment rails
- 6Countries reached through integrated payment rails
Payment railsCore bankingDistributed systemsWorker servicesEvent-driven architectureIdempotencyReconciliationObservability
01Current work · Leads Corporation Ltd.
A payment message is either structurally valid, or it is an incident with a customer attached.
SwiftFusion carries trade finance onto the SWIFT ISO 20022 standard inside BankUltimus - Spring Boot and Angular 19 over a Kafka backbone, with a Rust orchestrator holding the multi-service transactions together. It runs in two bank environments.
- Messaging standard, validated at the boundary
- ISO 20022Messaging standard, validated at the boundary
- Bank environments running it - NRBC, Southeast
- 2Bank environments running it - NRBC, Southeast
- Coordination models: 2PC, Saga, hybrid
- 3Coordination models: 2PC, Saga, hybrid
Built for banking clients - the interface and message contents are covered by client confidentiality. The diagram below describes the architecture at the level already published in my CV, and shows no institution's data.
02Product · SaaS product
One employee record. Four audiences with completely different rights.
SovoHR is a full HR ERP - employment, payroll, attendance, rota scheduling, compliance and recruitment - delivered as SaaS across three independently deployed surfaces. Laravel underneath, React on Vite in the portal, Next.js on everything public.
- portal.sovohr.comOrganisation portal · React · Vite
- sovohr.comMarketing · Next.js
- jobs.sovohr.comJob portal · Next.js
Modules that have to agree with each other.
Attendance feeds the rota, the rota feeds payroll, and payroll is the number somebody disputes. Corrections are recorded as attributed adjustments rather than edits in place - which is also exactly what a compliance audit asks for.
- Employee management - records, education history and work experience in one profile
- Payroll processing with attributed, auditable adjustments
- Attendance tracking with an hourly weekly grid and shift coverage
- ROTA and shift scheduling, including shift-change request workflows
- Right-to-work checks, document management and sponsor compliance reporting
- Recruitment and ATS feeding a public job portal on its own domain
Employee management - records, education and work history in one profile.
Rota scheduling as a 24-hour weekly grid, with shift coverage per day.
03Selected work
More launched systems still carrying real users.
Payments, bookings, contest infrastructure and a talent network. Most of them move money, all of them are launched, and each has a full write-up covering the architecture and what I would change.
02Marketplace2024
Resid+
Property booking across six African countries with local payment rails.
Express.jsMongoDBPaydunya APISocket.IOJWT
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03Marketplace2024
Your Capture Awards
Photography contest platform handling large uploads, judging and notifications.
Next.jsExpress.jsMongoDBAmazon S3Socket.IO
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04Product2024
Mélange
A cross-continent talent network for musical, digital and visual artists.
Next.jsExpress.jsMongoDBSocket.IOAgenda
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04Experience
Three years, and the shift from writing features to owning uptime.
From real-time messaging as an intern, to leading agency delivery across a hundred-plus builds, to the trade finance team of a core banking platform.
- Feb 2025 - PresentCurrent
Junior Software Engineer
Leads Corporation Ltd. - Core banking & financial software - Mirpur-14, Dhaka
- Jul 2024 - Jan 2025
Software Engineer & Team Lead
SparkTech Agency - Betopia Group - Banasree, Dhaka
- Dec 2023 - Jun 2024
Junior Software Engineer
SparkTech Agency - Betopia Group - Banasree, Dhaka
- Sep 2023 - Nov 2023
Software Engineer Intern
SparkTech Agency - Betopia Group - Banasree, Dhaka
05How I work
Opinions earned from things that broke.
None of these are novel. All of them cost something to learn.
- 01
Read the spec twice
Most production incidents are not clever failures. They are a field that meant something slightly different than assumed, discovered six months later at volume. An hour with the specification is cheaper than a week with the postmortem.
- 02
Make failure a state, not an exception
Anything crossing a network will fail partway through. If a partial failure leaves a queryable, resumable record, it is an operations task. If it leaves nothing, it is an incident and a customer support ticket.
- 03
Idempotency is not optional
Every external system will eventually deliver the same event twice. Handlers keyed on the caller's reference converge on one outcome no matter how many times they run. Design for the retry before you need it.
- 04
Boring where it counts
Novelty belongs in the parts of a system nobody's money depends on. In the settlement path, prefer the technology with the longest, dullest track record.
- 05
Write for the engineer who inherits it
Code is read far more often than it is written, usually by someone under time pressure who was not in the room for the decision. Leave the reasoning behind, not just the result.
06Writing
Long-form on architecture, and the decisions behind it.
Case studies go deep on one system. Articles pull out the parts that transfer.
- 18 May 2026Banking
Webhooks will lie to you
Payment providers retry, reorder and duplicate their callbacks. Here is the handler shape that survives all three.
- 02 Mar 2026Distributed Systems
Persist, then emit
The one ordering rule that separates real-time features that work from real-time features that work in the demo.
- 14 Jan 2026Architecture
The deadline is the load test
Contest platforms, ticket sales and tax portals share a traffic shape. Designing for the spike instead of the average.