Résumé

Islam Abdelzaher

إسلام عبد الظاهر

Senior Full-Stack Engineer

I ship complete, working products — every layer, end to end.

StackReact · Next.js · TypeScript · Node.js · PostgreSQL · Generative AI

Download CVPDF · English islam.abdelzaher@gmail.com

Based in: Alexandria, Egypt
Availability: Immediate
Work authorisation: Requires employer-sponsored visa for UK/EU opportunities
Open to relocation: UK · EU · UAE
Work preference: Remote, hybrid or relocation
Languages: Arabic (native) · English (professional working proficiency)

At a glance

10years of professional experience shipping enterprise web applications
4live production platforms as sole engineer at VentureX
~55 to ~90Lighthouse score on the SAIP national IP search platform
+25%daily search activity on SAIP — the rebuild contributed to this increase, per client analytics
~40%lower production regression rate on SAIP after adding E2E and unit tests to CI
~20%less per-project UI boilerplate from a shared TypeScript component library

Profile

Senior Full-Stack Engineer with 10 years of professional experience shipping enterprise web applications for government ministries and commercial clients.

Since August 2025 I have been the sole engineer on four live production platforms at VentureX, delivering every layer end to end: PostgreSQL schema, Supabase backend, React and Next.js frontend, and production infrastructure on Vercel, Railway and Cloudflare. There I'm also a full-stack engineer on the KFCRIS Strategic Performance Management System. I have also built and launched two further full-stack products on my own. Before that I spent six years as Senior Frontend Engineer at a 100+ person regional consultancy, delivering government platforms including the Saudi Authority for Intellectual Property (SAIP) national IP search platform.

I also build LLM-powered products: a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) proof of concept for Hakawati, a bilingual AI museum guide, and Job Hunter Agent, an autonomous job-application agent — both grounded in source data, with guardrails against invented facts.

I use Claude Code, Cursor and GitHub Copilot as daily production tools, with deliberate validation workflows. I'm looking for a Senior Full-Stack or Senior Software Engineer role in the UK, EU or UAE — remote, hybrid or relocation.

Experience

Aug 2025 to PresentRemote
Senior Full-Stack Engineer
VentureX
- Sole engineer on 4 live production platforms — Irthna, OneFarm, Bunn Khawlan and theventurex.com — delivering every layer end to end with no backend team: PostgreSQL schema design, Supabase backend (Auth, RLS, Realtime, Storage), Next.js App Router frontend and production deployment.
- Full-stack engineer, with other contributors, on the KFCRIS Strategic Performance Management System since February 2026 — a Next.js and Supabase platform for tracking organisational KPIs, with RBAC across 5 role levels, custom permission matrices and audit logging.
- Built the retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) proof of concept for Hakawati, a bilingual (Arabic / English) AI museum guide: OpenAI embeddings stored in pgvector (HNSW, cosine) on Supabase, locale-filtered semantic search behind row-level security, cited answers that abstain when evidence is weak, incremental content-hash ingestion, and an evaluation script for retrieval and answer quality.
- Designed and implemented multi-role RBAC systems, milestone-based transactional workflows, real-time data flows, file-upload pipelines and role-specific dashboards across platforms of varying complexity — from a 2-role e-commerce store to a 5-role marketplace.
- Built and deployed the VentureX company platform (theventurex.com): a full-stack Next.js and Railway application hosted on Vercel, with Vercel Analytics and Tailwind CSS.
- Managed infrastructure across every project: Cloudflare DNS, Workers and Firewall Rules, SSL provisioning, Railway backend services and Vercel deployments.
- Applied structured AI-assisted workflows with Claude Code and Cursor — explicit context scoping, output validation and review guardrails on every PR.
Apr 2025 to PresentRemote
Founder & Lead Developer
islamz.me
- Founded islamz.me as an independent product studio and lead it end to end: setting its direction, choosing what gets built and owning every technical decision behind it.
- Conceived, designed and shipped two full-stack products on my own initiative — TurathCheck, a heritage database of 369 sites across 13 regions, and BarberGo, an on-demand barber booking platform for Alexandria — with no external backend support.
- Decide the architecture and stack on every product — Next.js, Supabase and PostgreSQL — and carry each one from first idea to launch with no hand-offs between teams.
Feb 2019 to Apr 2025Alexandria, Egypt
Senior Frontend Engineer
eSpace For Software Development
- Led frontend engineering on 10+ enterprise projects over six years at a 100+ person regional software consultancy, serving government ministries and private-sector clients in Saudi Arabia, Egypt and the UAE.
- Rebuilt the national IP search platform of the Saudi Authority for Intellectual Property (SAIP) in Next.js. ISR, image optimisation, lazy loading and code splitting cut load time from ~6s to ~3.5s, contributing to a 25% increase in daily search activity per client analytics.
- Built a shared TypeScript component library with Storybook documentation, adopted across all active projects and reducing per-project UI boilerplate by ~20%.
- Introduced Playwright end-to-end tests and Jest / React Testing Library unit tests into the CI pipeline, reducing the production regression rate on the SAIP platform by ~40%.
Nov 2015 to Jan 2019Alexandria, Egypt
Frontend Developer
eSpace For Software Development
- Built user-facing features in HTML, CSS, JavaScript and React across multiple client projects, working in a supervised delivery team on government and enterprise contracts.
- Worked with UI/UX designers to turn Figma and Adobe XD designs into responsive, cross-browser-compatible interfaces.

Government platform highlights

National IP Search Platform
Saudi Authority for Intellectual Property (SAIP)
May – Jul 2023
- Public-facing government platform for trademark and patent search, used by legal professionals and businesses across Saudi Arabia.
- Led performance engineering: Lighthouse score from ~55 to ~90 through ISR, image optimisation, lazy loading and removal of render-blocking resources.
- WCAG 2.1 accessibility audit and remediation — full compliance achieved for all interactive components.
Strategic Performance Management System
King Faisal Center for Research and Islamic Studies (KFCRIS)
Feb 2026 – Present
- Enterprise KPI tracking platform for the King Faisal Center for Research and Islamic Studies, a Saudi government research centre — built at VentureX.
- Full-stack Next.js, Supabase and PostgreSQL, built with other contributors: 5-role RBAC, custom permission matrices, audit logging and real-time dashboard updates.

Skills

Frontend: React.js
Next.js (App Router, SSR, SSG, ISR, React Server Components)
TypeScript (strict)
JavaScript ES2022+
Redux
Zustand
TanStack Query
React Native
UI & design: Tailwind CSS
SCSS/SASS
Radix UI
Lucide
Responsive Design
WCAG 2.1 Accessibility
Web performance optimization
Core Web Vitals (LCP, CLS, INP)
Lighthouse
Data visualisation: D3.js
Chart.js
Recharts
Backend: Node.js
Express.js
NestJS
RESTful APIs
Supabase (Auth, Realtime, RLS, Storage)
PostgreSQL
Neon (serverless PostgreSQL)
Prisma ORM
PocketBase
JWT
OAuth
High-volume API services at scale
Low-latency distributed systems
Performance benchmarking of large-scale systems
CMS: Strapi (headless CMS)
Testing: Jest
React Testing Library
Playwright (E2E, headless browser automation)
GitHub Actions CI
DevOps & cloud: Docker
Docker Compose
Container-orchestrated platforms
CI/CD (GitHub Actions, GitLab, Jenkins)
Vercel (serverless functions, cron jobs)
Railway
Cloudflare (DNS, Workers, Pages, Firewall Rules)
CDN and edge caching
AWS (S3, CloudFront)
Google Cloud (GCP)
SSL/TLS
Observability and instrumentation
AI & tooling: Generative AI and LLM applications (Claude API, Claude Agent SDK, OpenAI API)
Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) and LLM chatbots
Embeddings and vector search (pgvector, HNSW)
Prompt engineering (structured JSON outputs)
AI agents and agentic workflows
MCP servers
LLM guardrails and hallucination checks
RAG evaluation
Claude Code
Cursor
GitHub Copilot
Tooling: Vite
Webpack
ESLint
Prettier
Husky
Conventional Commits
Semantic Versioning
Figma
Adobe XD
Domains: Government and public sector
Financial products
E-commerce and multi-role marketplaces
Organisational performance management (KPIs)
Ways of working: Cross-functional delivery with UX, QA, DevOps and product
Feature planning and backlog refinement
Delivery process improvement
Turning new product ideas into reliable production software

Projects

AI agentSolo: product, architecture and engineering
Job Hunter Agent
No public site
Autonomous AI job-application agent. Collects roles daily from LinkedIn's public search and company job boards, scores each one requirement by requirement against a verified profile, writes a tailored PDF CV and cover letter grounded in real experience and GitHub evidence (a deterministic guard blocks invented names and numbers), aligns keywords to each ad for ATS, and fills and submits application forms with headless Chromium.
- Next.js
- TypeScript
- Claude API (Opus, Haiku)
- Claude Agent SDK
- Prisma
- PostgreSQL (Neon)
- Playwright
- Headless Chromium
- Vercel Cron
- React PDF
- next-intl
- Zod
- Vitest
Cultural heritage crowdfundingSole engineer
Irthna
irthna.co
Bilingual (Arabic / English) crowdfunding platform for cultural heritage restoration. Project submission workflows, milestone-based fund release, verified restorer profiles and donor management.
- Next.js App Router
- TypeScript
- Supabase (Auth, RLS, Realtime, Storage)
- PostgreSQL
- Vercel
- Cloudflare
Agricultural marketplaceSole engineer
OneFarm
onefarmproject.com
Multi-role agricultural marketplace for Jordan — farmers, buyers, service providers, carriers and operators. 5-role RBAC, a PostgreSQL data model designed from scratch, real-time inventory and order routing. Beta launch with early-access users.
- Next.js
- TypeScript
- PostgreSQL
- Supabase
E-commerceSole engineer
Yemen Coffee (Bunn Khawlan)
yemencoffee.co
E-commerce platform for premium single-origin Yemeni coffee. Product catalogue, wholesale enquiry flow and a subscription system.
- Next.js
- Strapi headless CMS
- TypeScript
- Vercel
Company platformSole engineer
VentureX
theventurex.com
The VentureX company platform — a full-stack corporate website and digital presence.
- Next.js
- React
- Tailwind CSS
- Railway
- Vercel
- Vercel Analytics
Heritage databaseIndependent project
TurathCheck
turathcheck.vercel.app
Saudi cultural heritage database cataloguing 369 sites across 13 regions — tier classification (1–5), field assessment reports, an interactive map, advanced filtering and Arabic RTL.
- Next.js
- Supabase
- PostgreSQL
Booking platformIndependent project
BarberGo
barbergo.islamz.me
On-demand barber booking platform for Alexandria. Real-time availability, barber onboarding and vetting, a booking engine and a review system.
- Next.js
- Supabase Realtime
- PostgreSQL
Clinic booking and paymentsSole engineer
Dr. Hesham Sheshtawy Clinic
drhesham.islamz.me
Arabic-language booking site for a psychiatrist's clinic. Patients pick a slot and pay in full or a 50% deposit, by card through Paymob or by Instapay transfer; an appointment stays pending until its payment is confirmed. Instapay transfers are reviewed in an admin dashboard (receipt upload, approve or reject). Google sign-in and row-level security.
- Next.js
- TypeScript
- Supabase (Auth, RLS, Storage)
- PostgreSQL
- Paymob (card payments)
- Resend
- Tailwind CSS
- Vercel