Senior Software Engineer · Fintech & Payments · Cairo

Muhammad
Alnaqeeb

Startups bring me in to build the part that can't fail.

Eight years across fintech, crypto and high-traffic platforms — usually owning the services everything else depends on. Right now that's the wallet behind Egypt's largest fleet-payment network: the ledger, the transaction path, and the fraud check in front of both.

What I do

Payments & ledgers

Wallet platforms, double-entry ledgers and transaction workflows. Money systems have one hard requirement — the numbers reconcile, every time, including the times something breaks mid-flight.

Formance · Temporal · PostgreSQL

Distributed systems

Event-driven architectures and the orchestration that holds a long-running process together across a dozen services. Service boundaries drawn so they still make sense a year later.

Kafka · gRPC · Kubernetes

Real time at scale

Order matching for a crypto exchange, live market data, and high-traffic platforms where latency is the product and a bad design shows up immediately.

Go · Redis · ClickHouse

Selected work

2018 – present

Six systems, one habit: the part that can't fail goes first.

Products I built or led the backend for. Each entry is the problem, what I built, and what changed.

  1. Octane

    Fleet-payment wallet

    2024 – present

    Payments · Ledger · Fraud · Temporal · Formance

    Octane raises $5.2M — Wamda ↗
    Problem
    Egypt's largest fleet-payment network — 1,600+ corporate fleets paying for fuel, maintenance and tolls at 2,400+ stations — needed a wallet whose numbers reconcile under fraud pressure and morning-rush load.
    Built
    The ledger and transaction engine every payment runs through (Formance ledger, Temporal orchestration, NestJS/TypeScript, PostgreSQL, ClickHouse, AWS); live OCR verification that checks each transaction before the wallet is charged; the toll-payment integration.
    Changed
    Fraud down 82%; wallet transactions 3× faster (67% lower latency).
  2. PalCards

    Digital recharge & gift-card marketplace

    2023 – 2024 · Dinamo

    Payments · E-commerce · NestJS · GCP

    palcards.ps ↗
    Problem
    Merchants and resellers across the Middle East buying game top-ups and gift cards needed one marketplace with flexible payment options and reporting they could run a business on.
    Built
    The platform and its backend as lead of a 5–10-engineer team — catalog, payments, distributor financial reporting (NestJS, MongoDB, Google Cloud).
    Changed
    Shipped as a live B2B marketplace.
  3. Biddi Market

    On-demand delivery

    2023 – 2024 · Dinamo

    E-commerce · Mobile backends · Event-driven

    biddimarket.ps ↗
    Problem
    A Talabat-style delivery service for Qalqilya with three audiences — customers, merchants, couriers — each needing their own app on one backend.
    Built
    The backend and service boundaries behind the customer, merchant and courier apps; CI/CD that let a small team release often.
  4. Anchornize

    Operations platform for dive centers and marinas

    2022 – 2023 · AtenTEC

    Multi-tenant · Go · GCP · Migration

    anchornize.com ↗
    Problem
    Operators in different countries, currencies and regulations running bookings, trips, inventory and invoicing on spreadsheets and legacy on-prem tools.
    Built
    Multi-tenant, multi-currency platform from the start; event-driven microservices in NestJS and Go on Google Cloud; migration of legacy on-prem apps to GCP with data-sync workflows across a multi-database environment.
  5. Genwin

    Creator-economy platform on Solana

    2021 – 2022

    Crypto · Matching engine · Kafka · Solana

    genwin.io ↗
    Problem
    Creators selling memberships, community tokens and NFTs need wallets, payments and a token market that stays consistent at exchange-like speed.
    Built
    Components of the real-time order-matching engine and order-processing infrastructure (10K orders/second); the Kafka event pipeline for market and trading data; Phantom wallet integration for on-chain transactions.
  6. Zad Academy

    Online Islamic studies platform

    2018 – 2021

    Education · Full-stack · AWS

    zad-academy.com ↗
    Problem
    A global student body in Arabic, English and Spanish, with enrollment peaks that break platforms sized for average load.
    Built
    The learning platform's backend — Express.js APIs and schemas designed for performance and data integrity under peaks — plus the Angular and React Native front ends, Jenkins CI/CD and AWS deployment.

Where I'm useful

I do my best work where a startup is outgrowing its first architecture.

Small teams, real traffic, and decisions that are expensive to reverse. I've spent most of my career in that phase — the point where a service that worked fine for a year starts costing money every time it breaks, and someone has to redesign it without stopping the business.

Much of it where correctness, latency and money meet: an edge case there isn't a bug report, it's a balance that doesn't add up. That means transaction consistency, idempotency, reliable event propagation, and workflows built to be resumed rather than restarted.

And because startup teams are small: service design, architecture review, and mentoring that leaves people able to maintain the thing after I've moved on.

Experience

Full history on LinkedIn

  1. 2026 – now

    Software Consultant contract

    ExpertHub · GreenMobility, Copenhagen · remote

    Financial data platform on Snowflake, telemetry-driven billing, ~40% lower cloud spend.

  2. 2024 – now

    Senior Software Engineer

    Octane, Cairo · hybrid

    Own the wallet — ledger and transaction engine — behind Egypt's largest fleet-payment network.

  3. 2023 – 2024

    Senior Software Engineer contract

    Dinamo MEA · remote

    Led a 5–10-engineer backend team: PalCards, Biddi Market, e-commerce platforms across MEA.

  4. 2022 – 2023

    Software Engineer

    AtenTEC, Dahab

    Led the backend team building Anchornize; on-prem → GCP migration.

  5. 2021 – 2022

    Software Engineer contract

    Genwin, Ottawa · remote

    Order matching and Kafka pipelines for a Solana creator-economy platform.

  6. 2018 – 2021

    Software Engineer freelance

    Zad Academy, Kuwait · remote

    Full-stack for a global online academy.

Education B.E. Electrical, Electronics & Communications Engineering, Alexandria University (2019) · ALX / Holberton Software Engineering (2023) · Data Science Certificate, ExploreAI Academy (2024) · Programming with Google Go Specialization, UC Irvine (2023)

Tools

Highlighted where I go deepest

Languages

GoTypeScript JavaScriptSQL RustPythonBash

Backend & APIs

NestJSNode.js ExpressgRPCGraphQL RESTWebSockets

Architecture

MicroservicesEvent-driven TemporalFormance Ledger Distributed systemsReal-time System design

Infrastructure

AWSGCP KubernetesDocker TerraformCI/CDJenkins Linux

Data & messaging

PostgreSQLKafka RedisMongoDB ClickHouseBigQuerySnowflake

Also

AngularReact Native AuthenticationAccess control EncryptionSecure enclaves

Writing

Notes from the part that can't fail.

Buy a ledger or build one?

Every fintech hits the question. A ledger looks like a table with a balance column until you count what it has to guarantee — and what you still own after you buy one.

A smoke sensor that sends an invoice

What breaks when invoices are assembled by hand from device data, and what changes when the reading that detects smoke is the same number the customer pays for.

Why every wallet transaction runs through Temporal

A wallet transaction is not a request, it's a process. What broke when we treated it like one function call, and what changed when the whole flow became a durable workflow.

Let's talk

Open to senior and staff engineering roles — remote, or with relocation — and to consulting with startups on payments infrastructure and distributed systems.

The full history lives on LinkedIn.