About

I’m Muhammad Ahmed — a backend engineer based in Lahore, currently building and operating distributed systems at Careem (Uber’s $3.1B acquisition).

The Investigative Mindset

I have always had a curious mind. Since childhood, I’ve been driven to investigate peculiar things, wanting to understand how they work beneath the surface. That same investigative spirit now drives my career in engineering. I don’t just want to “make it run”—I want to know why it works, how it fails, and where the hidden inefficiencies are hiding.

At Careem, I apply this to things that matter when systems get serious: reliability under load, observability in opaque environments, and cost efficiency when the cloud bill arrives.

What I Do

I work at the intersection of system reliability and measurable business impact. Some of my recent investigations include:

  • Latency Engineering: Eliminated an 8-second endpoint bottleneck (reducing it to <1s) by identifying $N+1$ query patterns through distributed traces and implementing batch calls.
  • Observability: Instrumented Segment Builder, a mission-critical data platform, with 3-layer Redis observability on Dynatrace. This gave our team visibility into a previously opaque dependency for the first time.
  • Al-Driven Tooling: Co-built an MCP Server and Slack Bot that enables stakeholders to resolve queries in under 60 seconds, down from a 30-minute manual process.
  • FinOps: Designed multi-stage S3 Lifecycle Policies that cut log storage by 88%, reducing monthly cloud costs for targeted services by 83%.

Background

  • Experience: 3+ years at Careem, owning reliability for 15+ microservices handling peak traffic of 300k RPM.
  • Certification: AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (Score: 861/1000).
  • Education: CS graduate from FAST-NUCES — Dean’s List (2x).
  • Community: Contributor to Infracost, adding pricing support for AWS SageMaker resources to help engineers see costs before they deploy.

Now

(Updated May 2026)

  • Case Studies: I’m currently writing deep-dives into production experiments, like my concurrency analysis that proved how a “perfect” dashboard can hide silent data corruption.
  • Experiments: Building local labs to validate concepts from Designing Data-Intensive Applications (DDIA).
  • Open Source: Continuing to contribute to open source.
  • Opportunities: I am open to backend roles where distributed systems, reliability engineering, and investigative observability are the core focus.

Get In Touch

Email: muhammad.ahmed112719@gmail.com
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/muhammadahmed
GitHub: github.com/muhammadahmed-01