Open to opportunities

Shah Zai

@shahzai

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Senior software engineer specializing in ML-driven trading systems and backend performance.

United States

Message

What I'm looking for

I seek a full-time role building production ML systems or low-latency backend platforms where I can optimize performance, deploy models to production, and mentor engineers in an impact-focused, collaborative environment.

I am a Senior Software Engineer with eight years of experience building ML-driven trading platforms, backend infrastructure, and full-stack applications for fintech and document automation products.

I specialize in Python, C++, and JavaScript/TypeScript and have delivered high-performance systems processing 100k+ daily transactions, optimized backtesting engines from hours to minutes, and deployed containerized microservices on AWS.

My work includes architecting ML systems with PyTorch and FastAPI, developing real-time dashboards with React and TypeScript, and implementing low-latency trade execution and analytics pipelines that improved throughput and reduced operational costs.

I am pragmatic, metrics-driven, and enjoy mentoring engineers and leading technical initiatives that translate research into production systems with measurable business impact.

Experience

Work history, roles, and key accomplishments

Current

Independent ML & Backend Consultant

Current

Self-Employed

May 2025 - Present (1 year 1 month)

Architecting an ML-driven trading system and consulting on backend optimization, delivering predictive models with 85% accuracy and reducing 10-year simulation runtime from 6 hours to 18 minutes via C++ SIMD and multithreading.

Python PyTorch fastAPI C++React SIMD Multithreading PostgreSQL Redis

Senior Software Engineer

Quantolio

Jan 2020 - May 2025 (5 years 4 months)

Led full-stack development of an AI-powered portfolio platform, improving system throughput by 30%, raising model accuracy from 73% to 87%, and reducing 20-year backtests from 8 hours to 22 minutes through C++ optimizations.

Python fastAPI PyTorch C++React TypeScript PostgreSQL Docker AWS

Software Engineer

Hubdoc

Feb 2018 - Jan 2020 (1 year 11 months)

Built NLP-powered document classification and extraction pipelines processing 50k+ daily documents, achieving 93% accuracy on clean documents and automating over 85% of data entry workflows, saving 2,400+ manual hours monthly.

Python PyTorch SpaCy scikit learn fastAPI MongoDB Redis Apache Airflow AWS

Software Engineer

FrontFundr

Feb 2017 - Feb 2018 (1 year)

Developed RESTful APIs and investor dashboards, handling 5k+ daily API requests with sub-200ms responses and enabling $2M+ monthly transactions through integrated payment and KYC/AML workflows.

Python Django REST Framework fastAPI React TypeScript PostgreSQL Redis Stripe API Design

Education

Degrees, certifications, and relevant coursework

University of Windsor

Bachelor of Science (Honours), Computer Science

2013 - 2017

Completed a Bachelor of Science (Honours) in Computer Science with a Software Engineering specialization, focusing on software systems, algorithms, and applied machine learning.