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Ahmad Mujahid
Portrait of Ahmad Mujahid

Ahmad Mujahid

Lead Backend Engineer at Tern | Dubai, UAE

Ahmad Mujahid is a Lead Backend Engineer at Tern in Dubai. He builds payment systems and backend platforms in Node.js, TypeScript, and PostgreSQL, with 9 years in production.

  • AED 100M+in rent payments through the payments system I rebuilt
  • 4 payment providerscard acquiring, open banking, and installments in one ledger
  • 9 yearsbuilding production software, 5 of them in Dubai
  • 1,000+students in one live national exam

Experience

  1. Tern | Dubai, United Arab Emirates

    Lead Backend Engineer

    Sep 2026 to now, Full-time

    • Own backend architecture, technical direction, and delivery for a rent payments and rewards platform.
    • Coordinate releases across the backend, web, and mobile teams.
    • Own code review, the engineering standards, and testing and quality on money flows.
    • Own production reliability: monitoring, alerting, and incident response.
    • Hire, onboard, and mentor engineers.
    • Drive the team's use of AI-assisted development.

    Senior Backend Engineer

    Sep 2025 to Sep 2026, Full-time

    • Rebuilt the core payments system: charges, refunds, payouts, and provider integrations.
    • Hundreds of millions of dirhams in rent payments processed through the payments system I rebuilt.
    • Restructured the codebase and replaced manual deploys with automated build, test, and release pipelines.
    • Built the end-to-end test suite on money flows that guards every release.
    • Owned and modernized the partner-facing API.
    • Led payments features from design to production, including rent installments.
    • Built internal developer tools.
    • Introduced AI-assisted code review and ran AI training for the team.

  2. YH&H Products Design Services | Dubai, United Arab Emirates

    Lead Software Engineer

    Jun 2023 to Aug 2025, Full-time

    • Architected forK12, a school registration platform with payments, ID verification, and video conferencing.
    • Designed and built an AI portal for Ekhtibary: assessment generation, voice cloning, and dynamic reporting.
    • Acted as the sole technical authority over freelance developers, designers, and DevOps engineers.
    • Led the third-party integrations.

    Senior Software Engineer

    Feb 2022 to May 2023, Full-time

    • Built the Ekhtibary backend from scratch. It ran a live test with 1,000+ concurrent students.
    • Built a social media app with video processing and real-time chat.
    • Built a digital asset management system with file indexing.
    • Revamped the Arabee site with Next.js and a headless CMS.

  3. Hsoub | Remote

    Senior Software Engineer

    Oct 2020 to Dec 2021, Full-time

    • Led a development team of 4.
    • Ran code reviews and set coding standards.
    • Built REST APIs and cut the average API response time by about 20%.
    • Built real-time chat on WebSockets.
    • Profiled PostgreSQL queries.

    Software Engineer

    Aug 2019 to Oct 2020, Full-time

    • Integrated WebSockets in the backend and frontend of a real-time chat app.
    • Profiled the backend and applied optimizations.
    • Restructured slow SQL queries.
    • Refactored parts of the codebase for readability and maintainability.

  4. Nabdah | Remote

    Software Engineer

    May 2017 to Sep 2021, Contract

    • Built the UNICEF Social Protection system for 5,000+ beneficiaries.
    • Built the FAO Agricultural Information system.
    • Worked across the stack: Node.js, PHP, MySQL, and React.
    • Kept the systems at about 99.8% uptime.

  5. Elixir for intelligent software | On-site

    Software Engineer

    Jun 2018 to Oct 2020, Part-time

    • Built core components of the Elixir framework.
    • Built metadata-driven dynamic pages that load about 15% faster.
    • Integrated Solr search and cut query times by about 25%.

Selected projects

  • YSpot: Presented at Sheraa, AUS.
  • forK12: School registration with payments, ID verification, and video conferencing.
  • Ekhtibary: Student assessment platform. Ran a live test with 1,000+ concurrent students.
  • Arabee Learning
  • MPAC Sports: Video encoding and HLS streaming.
  • Orphans Management: Sole developer. Stack: Laravel.
  • Tinder-like app: Stack: React Native, Redis, WebSockets.
  • Crypto Trading Assistant: Senior project: reinforcement learning and NLP. Stack: Flask.
  • AIMS for FAO/SADC: Sole developer.
  • Elixir UI overhaul: Stack: React.
  • Domain-Based Auto-Archiving: Stack: OpenCV, Tesseract, Solr.
  • ISPMIS UNICEF: Sole developer. Stack: Java, JSF.
  • SCMS UNICEF: Sole developer.

Courses I teach

On Udemy