About

I’m Mustafa Shaikh, a backend engineer based in Islamabad.

Most of my work has been on systems where a dropped message costs someone something: real-time delivery to devices that come and go, money moving between countries, marketplaces where a leaked phone number or a double charge is a real person’s bad day. The interesting part of that work is rarely the happy path. It’s deciding what the system should do when the network drops, a dependency slows down, a message arrives twice, or a node goes quiet — and then making that decision boring and reliable.

Today I’m a senior backend engineer working on real-time, event-driven systems. Before that I worked on a money-transfer platform during its move from a monolith to services, on a shared design system and micro-frontend architecture, and on payments, disputes and privacy tooling for a B2B marketplace. I studied computer science at FAST National University.

How I work

• Failure first. I start a design by listing how it breaks. Retries, timeouts, duplicates, partial writes, stale caches. A design that doesn’t say what happens in each case hasn’t been finished.
• Boundaries you can name. Between services, between teams, between tenants. A boundary with a name has an owner and a test.
• Boring at the core, careful at the edges. PostgreSQL, a queue, a cache, plainly used. The care goes into the contracts: idempotency keys, deadlines, backpressure, liveness.
• Write it down. Design docs before code; runbooks before launch; these essays after.
• Agents as leverage, not autopilot. I build with AI coding agents daily, with code maps, narrow briefs and hard verification — and I own the architecture.

What I’m interested in

Distributed systems that stay correct under partial failure. Delivery guarantees. Offline and edge clients. Multi-tenant data. Payments and ledgers. The engineering of AI-assisted engineering.

I’m always glad to talk with teams working on hard backend and infrastructure problems, and I take on a small number of architecture and reliability engagements. The best way to reach me is email.