II
Open for freelance & contract work — Dubai, UAE — available remote

I build the systems founders trust their product with.

I'm Imaad Irshad, a senior backend, cloud & blockchain engineer. I don't specialize in a single stack — I move across Web2 backend, Web3/blockchain, and AI/LLM integration depending on what the problem actually needs.

01

Backend / Cloud

AWS · Lambda · CDK

02

Web3 / Blockchain

Solidity · EVM

03

AI / LLM

RAG · Agents

01About

Five years of turning ambiguous ideas into systems that hold up.

I'm a Senior Backend, Cloud & Blockchain Engineer based in Dubai, with about five years of experience spanning Solidity /EVM smart contracts, AWS CDK & Lambda infrastructure, and — more recently — AI/LLM engineering: retrieval-augmented generation, multi-agent pipelines, and streaming APIs.

Most recently, as a Senior Blockchain Engineer, I led a large-scale migration of production infrastructure to AWS CDK and owned the marketplace backend end to end — both the off-chain Web2 side and the on-chain Web3 side — while also serving as the sole technical interviewer for the team's engineering hires.

What I bring to a project isn't just implementation. It's reliable execution paired with proactive risk-anticipation — catching the failure mode before it ships, not after it pages someone at 2am. I'd rather give a client the honest scope and timeline up front than overpromise and explain later.

Founder-facing by default

Most of my strongest work has come from sitting directly with a founder or CEO while an idea is still a sketch, and turning it into something that actually runs in production.

I surface the edge cases early

In planning conversations I'm usually the one asking "what if this happens" or "what if that breaks" before a line of code is written — and thinking through more than one way to handle it.

Systems over syntax

I grasp architecture through how the pieces connect, not by memorizing framework trivia. That's what lets me move across backend, blockchain, and AI without treating each as a foreign country.

Work as a trust, not just a job

Every engagement gets the same honesty and care, regardless of size — transparent scoping, no cut corners, and work done right whether or not anyone's checking.

02Projects

Selected work

A mix of AI/LLM, cloud infrastructure, and blockchain systems — chosen to show range, not just repetition of one stack.

01Shipped in production

Digital Asset Treasury & Multi-Signature Custody

Sole custodian of a company's digital-asset treasury for three years — zero security incidents.

Owned multi-signature treasury operations safeguarding and disbursing $1.5M+ in payroll, vendor, and operational payments over three years with zero security incidents. Configured a multi-signature signer scheme with hardware-wallet-backed keys, enforcing segregation of duties so no single person could move funds alone. Designed a cloud-based signing architecture (AWS KMS, EIP-712) to replace a raw private key that had been held in an application environment variable, and led an independent security audit across the production smart contract suite, resolving every high-severity finding.

Gnosis SafeMulti-sig CustodyAWS KMSEIP-712Smart Contract Security Audit
Overview — coming soon
02In progress

Conversational Recommender System

A movie-recommendation assistant that talks like a person, not a search bar.

A conversational recommender system combining retrieval-augmented generation with a function-calling multi-agent pipeline, served through a streaming FastAPI backend. Instead of one monolithic prompt, separate agents handle intent parsing, retrieval, and response generation, streamed token-by-token to the client the same way production LLM products ship today.

PythonFastAPIRAGMulti-agent LLMStreaming API
Repo — coming soon
03Shipped in production

Large-Scale AWS CDK Infrastructure Migration

Took a production game platform's infrastructure from hand-managed to fully defined-in-code.

Led the migration of a live production platform's infrastructure to AWS CDK — Lambda, DynamoDB, and KMS-backed encryption, all defined and versioned as code. The goal wasn't just "lift and shift": it was removing the class of incidents caused by manual console changes and undocumented resource drift, so deploys became repeatable and reviewable instead of tribal knowledge.

AWS CDKLambdaDynamoDBAWS KMSTypeScript
Case study — coming soon
04Shipped in production

Blockchain Marketplace Backend

A hybrid on-chain/off-chain marketplace backend for trading digital assets.

Owned the backend for a digital-asset marketplace spanning both Web2 (off-chain order matching, inventory, user accounts) and Web3 (on-chain settlement, wallet-based authentication via EIP-712 signing, smart contract integration). The hard part was never the happy path — it was designing for what happens when a chain reorg, a stuck transaction, or a signed-but-unsent request leaves the two sides out of sync.

SolidityEVMthirdwebEIP-712Node/TypeScript
Overview — coming soon
03Services

What I can take off your plate

01

Backend & Cloud Systems

APIs, infrastructure, and services that hold up once real users show up.

  • AWS CDK / Lambda architecture and serverless backends
  • Infrastructure migrations from manual/console-managed to defined-as-code
  • API design, data modeling, and service boundaries
02

Smart Contracts & Web3

On-chain logic and the off-chain systems that have to agree with it.

  • Solidity / EVM smart contract development
  • Hybrid on-chain/off-chain backend architecture
  • Wallet-based auth (EIP-712), marketplace and settlement flows
  • Multi-signature treasury design and custody administration
03

AI / LLM Integration

Turning an LLM demo into a feature that survives production traffic.

  • RAG pipelines and retrieval architecture
  • Multi-agent systems and function-calling pipelines
  • Streaming APIs (FastAPI) for real-time LLM product experiences

How I actually work

“I don't just implement — I stress-test the idea with you before we build, so we're not firefighting later.”

Engagement options

Project-based

Fixed scope, fixed price. Best when you already know what you're building and need it built right — a defined feature, a migration, an MVP.

Monthly retainer

Ongoing capacity for teams that need a senior engineer on call for shipping features, unblocking infra, or advising on architecture as you go.

No fixed rate card yet — every engagement starts with a scoping call so pricing actually matches the problem. Let's scope it together →

Have an idea worth stress-testing?

Book a 30-minute call. We'll talk through what you're building, where it's likely to break, and whether I'm the right fit to build it with you.