Muhammad Waseem Riaz Awan

Where I come from

I started out writing PHP and Python for startups and small businesses, and spent most of the 2010s at Websentials, working on a Canadian payroll platform. That meant breaking a monolithic PHP application into modules, automating forms that people used to fill by hand, and connecting the system to QuickBooks, NetSuite, Zoho, BambooHR and others. Payroll is unforgiving — the numbers have to be right every time — and it shaped how I think about data, edge cases and reliability.

What I do now

Since 2022 I have worked as a principal engineer and delivery lead — at Tkxel, at Crowdbotics, and now at XPERTS — across projects in different stacks. Day to day that means designing architecture and database structure, reviewing security (CSRF, XSS, CORS), deploying to AWS, Azure and Linux servers, unblocking the team, and keeping stakeholders informed.

Over the last few years a growing share of my work has been AI: LLM-powered features, chatbots, task automation and agentic workflows using tools like LangChain and Claude. I treat these the same way I treat any other backend component — with clear data flow, proper error handling, and something you can actually maintain.

Full-stack, with AI in the loop

My depth is on the backend: data models, APIs, integrations, performance and the things that keep a system correct under load. On the frontend I have years of hands-on HTML, CSS, JavaScript, jQuery, Bootstrap, Livewire and Alpine.js.

For React, Next.js and other modern frontend frameworks I work with AI as a pair programmer, mainly Claude Code in the terminal. I design the architecture and the data flow, describe what I need, and review every change before it ships. The AI handles the parts I would otherwise spend time looking up. That is how I built a multilingual captions system for AI video calls (Django REST, Redis, PostgreSQL, React and Ant Design) in hours rather than weeks.

This website was built the same way: server-rendered on Cloudflare Workers, with a SQLite (D1) database, a contact pipeline and its own admin panel.

How I work

• I take ownership of a project end to end: architecture, build, deployment, upgrades and support.
• I prefer simple, well-structured systems over clever ones.
• I have trained developers both at work and in academies, and I enjoy mentoring.
• I communicate plainly and keep long-term client relationships.

Outside work: football, basketball, cricket, badminton, swimming — and a fair amount of gaming.