Zaheer Uddin

Lead Backend Developer · Laravel, AWS and LLM integration · West Midlands, UK

I lead a team of six (three backend, two frontend, one QA) on an employee-advocacy SaaS platform, owning backend architecture alongside the CTO. Ten years in PHP, eight of them in Laravel, and I have taken the same backend from Lumen 5.5 through to Laravel 12 on PHP 8.4.

These days a good share of that work is AI. I design and ship the platform's LLM features - OpenAI-powered content generation built into the Laravel codebase, along with the prompt engineering, variant flows and token accounting behind them. I build with agentic tooling daily and review its output as closely as any other code.

MSc Data Science & Analytics (Distinction), University of Hertfordshire.

Open source

Four merged pull requests to github/spec-kit, GitHub's official Spec-Driven Development toolkit:

• #1556 - clarify checklist file handling for append vs create
• #1557 - correct a conflicting question limit in clarify
• #1558 - remove Makefile from C ignore patterns
• #1559 - add script validation and branch checkout error handling

Working with

PHP Laravel Lumen MySQL Redis Apache Solr REST & SOAP APIs OpenAI API Prompt Engineering Claude Code MCP Spec-Driven Development AWS Docker Kubernetes GitLab CI/CD Linux Angular TypeScript Python

A note on this profile

Most of my day-to-day work lives in GitLab, so this GitHub profile shows only a slice of it. The portfolio below has the full picture.

Elsewhere

• Portfolio - zaheer-uddin.dev
• LinkedIn - linkedin.com/in/zaheer15351
• GitLab - gitlab.com/zaheer15351