Experience
Career
timeline
From full-stack workflow platforms to Zero Trust security to leading AI and data platforms. Every company I have worked for has asked me to come back.
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Portfolio · Volume 8Backend, platform and AI engineeringWalsall, West Midlands, UK
ASPAby Saji
Pappachan
Pappachan
- Role
- Technical Lead
- Years
- 8, across four startups
- Focus
- Backend · Platform · AI and LLMs
- Speaks
- TypeScript · Node.js · Go · Python
available now, for the right role
Backend & AI
UKright to work
no sponsorship required
no sponsorship required
I build backend systems that scale, and AI that ships.
Eight years architecting distributed systems, secure platforms and LLM-powered products, from high-performance MCP platforms to production AI agents.
About
My whole career, 8 years across four startups, has been owning products end to end: a Zero Trust security product built from nothing to 10+ enterprise customers, a company-wide reporting platform, and production LLM and MCP infrastructure.
I'm the person people bring "could we actually do this?" to, before anyone spends money finding out. At every company I've worked at, product managers, architects and sales brought me ideas to assess, and my proofs of concept repeatedly became the base implementation months later.
I work mostly in TypeScript and Node.js, with Go and Python where they fit, across NestJS services, event-driven systems on AWS, and MCP and LLM platforms. I like pairing leadership with hands-on work: mentoring a team, setting the review standards, and building things that scale and keep working.
8 yrsbackend, platform and AI engineering
2M+users of a browser extension I built
50kmessages a day through my notification platform
45%lower infrastructure cost from my analytics stack
300+SaaS providers in my simulation framework
Inside the machine
Taken
apart, put
back.
A laptop is where all of this gets built, so it's how I explain it. Every part has one job, the parts have to fit together, and nothing runs until they all do.
Career
2025 to Jun 2026
Technical Lead
Josys Digital Technologies
- Promoted to Technical Lead after two consecutive years rated top performer. Selected for Architect in 2026.
- Led and mentored a team of 4 engineers through design reviews, pairing and code review.
- Coordinated delivery across 3 product teams as the backend architecture owner, setting the interface contracts between services.
- Owned code review and engineering standards across every project in the company, and ran technical interviews and onboarding for new backend hires.
- Built MCP clients and servers that cut integration time for new services from 2 weeks to 2 days.
- Shipped an internal LLM platform for context-aware retrieval that saved the team 8 hours a week, with 60% less manual querying.
- Designed an analytics stack, Airbyte → DuckDB → Apache Airflow: about 70% faster queries above 50M rows, 45% lower infrastructure cost, and reports down from 25 minutes to under 2.
2022 to Mar 2025
Senior Software Engineer
Josys Digital Technologies
- Championed NestJS as the company-wide backend standard across 12+ microservices, cutting new-engineer onboarding from 6 weeks to 3.
- Built a notification platform handling 50,000 messages a day, consolidating 8 flows into one across email, Slack and Teams.
- Built a browser extension serving over 2 million users from a single codebase across Chromium and Firefox, Manifest V2 and V3, with silent activation for enterprise deployment.
- Built a simulation framework covering 300+ integrated SaaS providers. It cut testing infrastructure cost 35%, never needed a bug fix, and became the customer-facing production sandbox.
- Led the security project and team, building a Go service that orchestrates Semgrep, Gitleaks and Trivy across the GitHub repository estate.
- Built a multi-database GraphQL platform with automatic schema generation and dynamic filter conversion.
- Rated top performer two years running.
2019 to Aug 2022
Member of Technical Staff (MTS-1)
InstaSafe, Bengaluru
- Designed and built a Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA) solution from scratch, part of a new product line that brought in 10+ enterprise customers.
- Built a gateway server for agentless access to private web apps, cutting enterprise customer onboarding time 40%.
- Led 3 engineers delivering 6 security product enhancements, each from design through production.
- Built a cross-platform desktop client for secure access to private resources.
2018 to May 2019
Earlier experience
GrowthEnabler · Haappy, Bengaluru
- GrowthEnabler, Aug 2018 to May 2019: built a full-stack SRM workflow platform and a startup-to-corporate matching system.
- Haappy, Jan to Aug 2018: built WebTV websites and an internal CRM for task and workflow tracking.
2013 to 2017
B.E. Computer Science & Engineering
East Point College of Engineering, Bengaluru
Personal projects
Things I've built
Agent runtimes, developer tools, media pipelines and native apps. Projects marked Open source have public code you can read today. Projects stamped Private aren't public yet, and AgentKit is the next one being prepared for an open-source release.
Projects with their own site
And the rest of the shelf
Professional work
Platforms & systems
Backend, data and AI platforms I delivered at Josys and InstaSafe.
Skills
Technical toolkit
All at once
The whole toolkit, exploded.
Contact
Let's build something worth shipping.
Available immediately. Open to senior Backend, Platform and AI roles across the West Midlands, or remote in the UK.