About Mohamed Ashraf Elsaed

I am a software engineer with 8+ years of experience in project architecture, backend development and performance work. Today I am technical lead at Convertedin in Cairo, Egypt, where I own technical decisions for AI-driven SaaS products. Outside work I build open-source tools for AI coding agents.

What I do

• Backend architecture: PHP, Laravel and Node.js systems for an AI-driven SaaS platform.
• Tools for AI coding agents: memory (Aletheia), visual feedback (Loupe) and project setup (Claude Kit), plus an agent SDK for Laravel.
• Teaching and mentoring: web-development instructor at AMIT Learning, and code review and training for the teams I lead.
• Writing: practical posts from this work on the blog, with commands, numbers and sources.

Experience

1. Technical Lead · Convertedin

   Jan 2026 to present

   Leads backend engineering for AI-driven SaaS products, owns technical decisions and builds scalable systems; leads the backend teams for Flyerz and ConvertedPay; creator of ConvertedOrders.

2. Software Engineer · Convertedin

   Aug 2022 to Jan 2026

   Rebuilt the Flyerz backend with Laravel, Redis and MySQL, and led its developer team.

   • Designed the Flyerz architecture with architects, and used Redis to improve response times and scale.
   • Built RESTful APIs for mobile and integrated secure online payment gateways.
   • Gathered requirements with clients and internal teams, and fitted new modules into legacy systems.
   • Directed unit and integration testing, and ran code and design reviews.
   • Coordinated frontend and backend teams, and ran ongoing training for the team.
   • Managed WHM and cPanel environments.

3. Back End Developer · Orcas

   Apr 2019 to Aug 2022

   Agile squads, RESTful APIs, CI/CD and scalability work.

   • Designed and built features and RESTful APIs in agile sprints, and worked with QA on releases.
   • Took part in CI/CD, code reviews and documentation.
   • Optimised applications for scalability and performance, and gave internal technical talks.

4. Web Development Instructor · AMIT Learning

   Aug 2019 to Nov 2019

   Designed and taught a web-development curriculum and mentored students.

   • Ran hands-on workshops, project-based learning and code review sessions.
   • Evaluated student projects, gave feedback and mentored students one to one.
   • Organised guest lectures and industry talks.

5. Back End Developer · ClueApps

   Feb 2018 to May 2019

   PHP and Laravel applications, Eloquent ORM and third-party API integrations.

   • Built web applications with PHP, Laravel (routing, middleware, service container) and MySQL, and designed database schemas.
   • Integrated third-party APIs, used Git, took part in code reviews and wrote module documentation.

Roles: my GitHub profile README and LinkedIn profile, checked 2026-10-30.

Engineering work

What I have built and run in production since 2022, by area. It is summarised from my own commit history and written in general terms: no customers, figures or internal systems.

• Payments and money correctnessA provider-agnostic gateway layer for card and local-wallet payments. Orders stay pending until a signed webhook or a reconcile sweep confirms payment, and failures restore stock. Wallet and ledger code with row locks, idempotent writes and tests for money invariants.
• Webhooks and queuesRaw-body signature checks that fail closed, acknowledge-first receivers, per-project fan-out queues with retries and dead-letter replay, Redis de-duplication, Redis and Laravel Horizon queues, and Redis Streams.
• Ad-platform integrationsAd-creation APIs for social ad platforms, load balancing across ad accounts, scheduled syncs, idempotent ledger ingest, and access tokens encrypted at rest with a dual-read rollout.
• AI features in SaaS productsProduction features built on OpenAI, Claude and Gemini: interest and targeting suggestions, ad-copy variants behind feature flags that reject over-limit output instead of cutting it, multi-agent pipelines, and guards that reject AI-written numbers the data does not back.
• Performance and reliabilityIndexes chosen from the slow-query log, N+1 removal, chunked exports and caching. A long-lived worker transaction leak, a lock that was shorter than the work inside it, and a queue-backlog metric that measured the wrong thing, each found and fixed.
• Shared servicesSmall services that several products share: a webhook gateway and a generic web-scraping service with no per-site selectors.
• Delivery, testing and upgradesCI gates and test ratchets, deploy pipelines cut from minutes to under a minute with rollback by commit, a Laravel 12 to 13 and PHP 8.4 upgrade, and test-database isolation checked in CI.
• Team and AI-assisted engineeringCode review and mentoring, and a Claude Code setup (rules, hooks, skills and sub-agents) rolled out to the whole team. Most work since 2026 is AI-assisted and reviewed by me.

Products I have worked on

From my LinkedIn projects list.

• Flyerz · Aug 2023 to presentA mobile app that helps online pages create ads on Facebook and Instagram.
• Orcas For Users · Apr 2019 to Apr 2022An app to find tutors, babysitters and language instructors nearby, with a separate app for partners.

Also listed on LinkedIn: Fennex, Gold Makers Syndicate, Medical Empire, Bo Ali and SunSat.

Education and certifications

• Diploma, Web Development, Cairo University, 2017 to 2018
• B.Sc., Management Information Systems, Institute Qualitative Studies, 2012 to 2016
• Symfony 5 (SymfonyCasts): Symfony 5 Fundamentals, Doctrine and the Database, Charming Development in Symfony5, October 2020

Skills

• Languages: PHP, TypeScript, JavaScript, Python, Go, SQL
• Backend and frameworks: Laravel, Symfony, Node.js, Bun, NestJS, Vue.js
• Data and infrastructure: MySQL, PostgreSQL, Redis, SQLite, Docker, Git, Linux
• Architecture and practice: Software architecture, Systems design, Database design, Design patterns, RESTful APIs, Code review and mentoring
• AI and agents: Claude Code, Model Context Protocol (MCP)

Source: my GitHub profile README and my projects, checked 2026-10-31.

Volunteering

Volunteer IT specialist at White Page since January 2014, and volunteer work with the Resala Charity Organization (source: my LinkedIn profile).

Facts, in one place

The press page has short and long biographies and the verified profile list (English).

How I work

I state what was measured and how to repeat it. Claims about other projects carry a source and a date. Where I could not check something, the page says so.

Contact

See the contact page.