Portfolio
Muhammad Zia · Full Stack AI Engineer
Building production AI systems: full-stack apps with LLMs, agents, and real users on day one.
Where AI meets full-stack:
I ship the full surface: React/Next.js frontends, Node backends, and the AI layer that sits between them: LLM integrations, agentic workflows, RAG pipelines, streaming UIs, human-in-the-loop controls, and the observability and guardrails that keep it all from falling apart in production. AI isn't a demo bolted on at the end. It's architected in from day one.
Impact where it matters:
Global platforms serving 200+ international operations teams. Experimentation infrastructure contributing to 34% conversion lift across enterprise clients. Error handling systems capturing 99.8% of failures and reducing support burden by 47%. Design transformations improving developer velocity 3x. Bulk processing systems handling 10M+ records.
Recent leadership:
- Shipped production LLM and agentic features built to degrade gracefully when models misbehave
- Reduced deployment friction 68% and cut cloud costs $2.4K/month through CI/CD optimization
- Improved system reliability to 99.8% capture rate through comprehensive error handling architecture
- Accelerated feature delivery 3x by establishing design system standards and component libraries
- Architected industrial schematics platform used globally across marketing and engineering operations
Trusted to introduce structure in fast-moving environments, mentor engineering teams, and make the technical decisions that determine whether systems scale or collapse under pressure, whether those systems are traditional web apps or AI-powered products.
Top Rated Plus on Upwork · 100% Job Success Score · MSc Software Engineering, Kingston University
Impact
Career Highlights
I've won many hats as a software engineer, from full stack to architecture and everything in between.
Production AI features: MCP, spam detection, semantic search
2024 - 2022Shipped production LLM and agentic features across Convert and Instantly: an MCP (Model Context Protocol) server exposing Convert's experimentation platform to LLM clients as tools, an AI email editor at Instantly that detects spam-trigger language in real time, and a natural-language lead search that replaces rigid filter UIs with semantic retrieval.
Brought agentic workflows to an enterprise experimentation platform via Anthropic's open MCP standard. At Instantly, directly improved outbound inbox deliverability and let users find leads by describing an ideal customer profile in plain English.
Schematics platform for global operations
Present - 2024Delivering core internal applications used across marketing and operations, including a schematics platform enabling teams to create and manage complex diagrams for trucks, oil refineries, plastic manufacturing plants, inside-out protection systems, tugboats and more.
Own architecture and feature delivery end-to-end, from system design to deployment, ensuring scalability, clean abstractions and long-term maintainability. Used across global marketing operations.
Multi-Arm Bandit optimization & Visual Editor
2024 - 2021Delivered Multi-Arm Bandit (MAB) features and contributed significantly to the Visual Editor, improving experimentation performance, usability and customer experience at Convert.com.
Enhanced experimentation platform capabilities, maintained backend systems ensuring schema integrity, and raised engineering quality through clean-code practices and proactive technical debt management.
Global error boundary & bulk tagging systems
2024 - 2022Built a global error boundary system that captured app-wide failures and delivered bulk tagging across campaigns, accounts and emails at Instantly.
Sharply reduced user frustration and support ticket volume. Major productivity improvement for high-volume users. Enhanced codebase structure, stability and API reliability.
Design system & CI/CD pipeline upgrade
2022 - 2020Led a full front-end redesign, implementing a modern design system and upgrading the CI/CD pipeline to Heroku at Pocketnote.
Improved overall UX consistency and performance. Reduced deployment friction and lowered operational cost. Delivered features across React and Node.js, improving stability, speed and maintainability.
Vue.js to React.js migration
2019Migrated the front-end from Vue.js to React.js at Cobija Industries, improving maintainability and performance.
Improved UI responsiveness and optimized backend interactions. Led a remote team of developers, providing technical direction and code reviews. Delivered stable, well-tested features.
mcp-policy-guard (npm)
2026Most MCP servers ship demo-grade: no per-tool auth policies, no write confirmation gates, no audit trail, and no PII redaction on tool results. Those are exactly the gaps that show up the moment you expose a production SaaS to LLM clients.
Published Express-style middleware for MCP servers: glob policies (allow / deny / requireConfirmation), token-bucket rate limits, JSONL audit logs with hashed args, and result redaction. Wrap an existing server in a handful of lines.
ragbench-lite (npm)
2026RAG pipelines usually ship on vibes: swap an embedder, glance at a chat demo, and miss retrieval regressions until users ask for a product code the vector index never hits.
Shipped a CLI + library that evaluates any pipeline against YAML golden questions: hit-rate@k, MRR, answer-contains, LLM-as-judge faithfulness, latency percentiles, and CI gates that fail on regressions.
streamguard-react (npm)
2026React Error Boundaries catch render crashes; streaming LLM UIs fail differently: stalls, mid-stream drops, and tool-call errors that would otherwise wipe partial tokens the user already saw.
Published a headless React library with useGuardedStream and StreamBoundary: typed stream failure classes, partial-preserving fallbacks, exponential retry, and optional resume-from-checkpoint.
react-crash-guard (npm)
2026In production React apps, a single render error can take down the whole surface. Teams often rely on one generic boundary or none at all, and native boundaries never catch async failures, so users see a white screen and you lose usable error signal.
Published a layered pattern (global, route, and feature boundaries) with async-to-boundary bridging, error classification, recovery hooks, and pluggable reporters (including Sentry) so crashes stay contained, recoverable, and visible in observability tools.
prompt-protection (npm)
2026LLM products accept arbitrary user text; without a gate, prompt injection, jailbreaks, and data-exfiltration phrases can reach the model and override instructions or leak context. Naive blocklists create false positives and miss obfuscated payloads.
Shipped a zero-dependency, TypeScript-first guard with weighted scoring across dozens of rules, verify/strip/analyze APIs, Express and Next.js middleware, a React hook for chat UIs, and an optional Claude adapter for a second verification pass before tokens hit your provider.
Writing
Blog Posts
Posting my thoughts and learnings as I go.
Building an MCP Server for a Production SaaS: Lessons from Exposing an Experimentation Platform to LLMs
20/07/2026Tool-first design, auth for LLM clients, idempotent writes, and the schema/prompt failures that show up once MCP hits production.
Agentic Write Actions: Letting an LLM Touch Your Production Database Without Losing Sleep
13/07/2026The safety ladder from read-only to scoped autonomous writes, RBAC, audit trails, confirmation tokens, and a near-miss that forced the design.
RAG Beyond the Demo: Shipping Retrieval Over Messy Internal Documents
06/07/2026Chunking for datasheets vs prose, hybrid search for product codes, golden-question eval before you touch a vector store, and extension latency budgets.
Cloudflare Workers AI vs Hosted LLM APIs: When Edge Inference Actually Wins
29/06/2026Cost, latency, and quality from a real ingestion pipeline, plus a confidence-gated routing pattern between edge models and frontier APIs.
Building Scalable Error Handling Systems: How We Reduced Support Tickets by 47%
01/02/2025A deep dive into architecting production-grade error boundaries that capture 99.8% of failures, refreshed for streaming LLM UIs.
System Architecture Patterns for React/Node Applications: Building for Scale from Day One
09/02/2025How proper architectural decisions early on can 3x developer velocity and prevent technical debt.