Software Developer at PaayaTech · Toronto
Product engineer. I build the backends products run on, and I care how they feel on the other end.
Three years shipping production systems in Python and .NET, from a delivery platform in four Indian cities to legal-tech in Canada. I've also built native Android and iOS apps for enterprise clients.
{
"name": "Shaheem",
"role": "Product Engineer",
"based_in": "Toronto, Canada",
"now": "Software Developer @ PaayaTech",
"shipped": [
"Tifflo",
"Agua India",
"Grocify.ai"
],
"cares_about": "how it feels on the other end"
} Selected work
How each one works, and the decision that shaped it.
Delivery tracking for home-meal providers, run over WhatsApp.
Replaced WhatsApp threads and spreadsheets with one source of truth.
Meal counts are a ledger, not a number. Every delivery, pause and skip is an entry, so any count can be traced and any mistake reversed.
Water delivery backend for 20,000+ users across India.
20% faster delivery processing, 40% higher vendor sales productivity, 99% uptime.
Fix the slow paths before adding features. Query optimization and geospatial indexing came first, then a real-time vendor dashboard.
Weekly meal plans and pantry tracking inside WhatsApp.
10+ active users planning 21+ meals a week. Most replies under 500 ms.
Live inside WhatsApp instead of shipping an app. Onboarding costs nothing. The hard part became keeping multi-step conversations consistent.
Matches surplus restaurant food with nearby NGOs.
Replaced ad-hoc WhatsApp coordination with a structured workflow.
A fast match beats the best match. Food spoils in hours, so any nearby NGO alerted quickly is worth more than a perfect one alerted late.
Experience
Backends for delivery, e-commerce and legal teams, in India and Canada.
2025 – now
Legal-tech backend: document ingestion, summarization and legal event extraction.
ASP.NET · SQL Server
2025
API features for product experiments, and AI workflows with deterministic fallbacks.
Node.js · Python · MongoDB
2023 – 24
Delivery backend for 20,000+ users. Cut processing time by 20%.
Django · PostGIS
2022 – 23
REST APIs for logistics and e-commerce platforms serving 13,000+ users.
Django REST · AWS
Stack
I pick by the constraint in front of me, not by habit.
Python
Django, FastAPI
My own products
.NET
ASP.NET Core, SQL Server
Enterprise work
Mobile
Jetpack Compose, SwiftUI
Enterprise apps. Still learning SwiftUI.
Web & data
React, Next.js, PostgreSQL
Interfaces and storage
Prefer proven technology.
Clever is rarely worth it.
Make tradeoffs explicit.
Say what we gain and what we lose.
Write for the next developer.
The team maintains it, not the compiler.
Contact