Full capacity · B2B contractor or EOR · No relocation
UTC+6 — afternoons overlap European working hours
Based in Comilla, Bangladesh
Syful Islam
Shakil
Software Engineer & Tech Lead
10+ years building software that ships — for SaaS platforms, European agencies, and US-based startups. I spent six years as the founding frontend engineer on a UK B2B talent intelligence platform serving 22M candidate profiles, from first commit through to acquisition — leading a three-engineer team, running frontend hiring, and holding the architecture through a scale-up to 16 engineers and a downsize to 4. I ship production LLM integrations with real validation, not demos.
Skills & Stack
Frontend
Backend
DevOps & Infra
Leadership
AI in Production
Work Experience
Contract (via German agency)
Lead Frontend Engineer
Lead frontend engineer on a B2B SaaS platform for talent intelligence and organisational research. Engagement ended when the product was acquired; the acquirer did not retain contractors.
A hands-on product partner — not just an implementer. I planned and decided alongside the product owner, shaping requirements, scope, and how features behaved before any code was written.
- Founding frontend engineer — owned architecture, state management, the API integration layer and weekly releases from first commit through to acquisition
- Longest tenure on the engineering team at six years; next-longest was 3.5
- Retained as the most senior engineer through a downsize from 16 engineers to 4
- Led a three-engineer frontend team and ran frontend hiring: 15 candidates interviewed, 6 hired and onboarded
- Diagnosed UI freezes under concurrent background jobs and fixed them by tiering event delivery — high-priority completions over Pusher, interval polling for the rest
- Led the frontend for AI-assisted candidate search: an LLM extracts filter criteria from a described profile, surfaced as an editable draft the user validates before running
- Built the data-dense search, filtering and analytics interfaces used concurrently by 30–40 researchers at global automotive and consumer brands
Freelance
Tech Lead & Product Owner
Platform where companies evaluate and grow developer talent through assessments and live competitive challenges. Delivered to MVP; paused while the founder raised funding.
I owned the product direction end-to-end — deciding which features shipped, how they worked, and the workflows behind them, then leading the team to deliver them.
- Owned product scope and roadmap — feature decisions, behaviour, and workflows
- Led delivery across 5 engineers and 4 product stakeholders — planning, implementation oversight, and quality at every milestone
- Coordinated mobile app releases across iOS and Android with store compliance
- Shipped REST API features — invitations, assessments, PDF reports, and role-based access
- Powered real-time multiplayer coding battles via WebSockets and a matchmaking engine
- Built multi-language question generation on the Claude API with a human-in-the-loop review step — 100 validated questions in ~40 minutes at a 5% rejection rate
Selected Projects
01
MapX — Talent Intelligence Platform
B2B SaaS platform for talent intelligence and organisational research, serving 22M candidate profiles. Built the data-dense search, filtering and analytics interfaces used concurrently by 30–40 researchers at global automotive and consumer brands, and led the frontend for AI-assisted candidate search — an LLM extracts filter criteria from a described profile, surfaced as an editable draft the user validates before running. Owned the full frontend architecture, state management, API integration, and automated deployment pipelines across dev, staging, and production.
02
DevArena — Developer Evaluation Platform
Platform for companies to evaluate and grow developer talent through assessments and live competitive challenges. Led the team end-to-end — shipping REST APIs, real-time multiplayer coding battles via WebSockets, a matchmaking engine, iOS & Android releases, and AI-powered multi-language question generation at scale.
03
AI Property Management Dashboard
A personalized AI assistant with a public portfolio layer and a private dashboard — built with Next.js, PostgreSQL, and Claude API. Features natural-language querying, property management, and AI-augmented workflows. Actively in development.
04
Solar + AI Battery Scheduling
Hybrid inverter integration with an API-driven scheduling layer that shifts battery charge and discharge against tariff windows and generation forecasts. Raised household energy self-sufficiency from 62% to 72% across two iterations. Also runs a multi-floor home network (Starlink → Mikrotik → mesh Wi-Fi) with tenant subnet isolation and bandwidth controls.
Client Testimonials
It has been a pleasure working with Shakil. He is a very experienced developer with excellent communication and people management skills. He is detail-oriented and always meets his deadlines. I can highly recommend working with Shakil.
When we started working together, I didn't realise it will be such a great experience to work with Shakil. He is a very reliable, hard-working person who has vast experience in full-stack development. Very good at communication and was always available whenever needed. He has solved a lot of complex functionality throughout these 2 years of working together. Hopefully, in future, we will work on more projects together.
Contact
Let's build
something
together.
Whether it's a product idea, a technical challenge, or a collaboration — I'm always open to a good conversation.