Imdad Ali Khan

Senior Product Engineer building and scaling AI-driven platforms - end to end.

I help startups ship faster and run reliably by owning backend, infrastructure, and deployment, with async-first communication and structured check-ins.

Let's Talk View LinkedIn

About

I am Imdad Ali Khan, a senior product engineer with + years building and operating production systems across web, backend, mobile, and cloud infrastructure.

I focus on AI-driven platforms and reliability. This includes ingestion pipelines, background processing, caching strategies, CI/CD, and production-safe LLM integrations.

I also build OwlBrief, an AI-powered news platform that I design, deploy, and operate end to end. It runs a fully automated pipeline from content ingestion to classification, summarization, and publishing, and reflects how I build and run real client systems in production.

I work best with teams that value clear priorities, async-first communication, structured check-ins, and ownership over micromanagement.

Projects

OwlBrief — decision-grade daily intelligence.

Decision-grade intelligence product for understanding real-world change

Tech: Rails 8 · Hotwire · OpenAI · PostgreSQL · Redis · Docker · CI/CD

What it is

A production AI system that ingests global news, research, and expert analysis, clusters related events, classifies significance, generates factual summaries, and publishes curated briefings — optimized for clarity, cost, and reliability.

Key contributions & impact

  • End-to-end LLM pipeline: Designed and built ingestion, event clustering/deduplication, significance classification, cost-aware summarization, caching, and publishing.
  • Human-level event clustering: Grouped multiple headlines about the same real-world event, preventing duplication and reducing noise.
  • Full ownership: Owned backend architecture, infrastructure, CI/CD, observability, and production operations.
  • Performance: Reduced end-to-end latency by ~60% through caching, smart excerpting, and pipeline optimization.
  • Cost controls: Designed deterministic guardrails, input reduction, prompt reuse, and output caching to control spend at scale.
  • Deployments: Delivered zero-downtime releases using Docker-based CI/CD workflows and rolling updates.

Research Hub API — High-performance backend platform

Production API for large-scale research aggregation

Tech: FastAPI · Python · MySQL · Vector DB · Redis · Docker · Terraform · Ansible · CI/CD

What it is

A production backend powering large-scale research ingestion, semantic search, and retrieval workflows with a strong focus on performance and reliability.

Key contributions & impact

  • High-performance services: Designed backend services handling large datasets with consistently low response times.
  • Semantic retrieval: Built vector database pipelines to support semantic search and retrieval use cases at scale.
  • Infra + delivery: Owned infrastructure provisioning, deployments, and delivery using Terraform, Ansible, and automated CI/CD pipelines.

Research Hub Mobile — Offline-first mobile application

Cross-platform research workflows for low-connectivity environments

Tech: React Native · Expo · Offline Sync · CI/CD

What it is

A cross-platform mobile application supporting real-time collaboration and offline-first research workflows.

Key contributions & impact

  • Single codebase: Built a shared iOS/Android codebase with clean, maintainable API integration.
  • Offline-first reliability: Implemented robust sync patterns to ensure usability under poor network conditions.
  • Performance tuning: Optimized performance and data handling for field usage and low-connectivity scenarios.

Unicircles — Scalable community platform

Professional networking platform built for reliability

Tech: Ruby on Rails · MySQL · Redis · AWS S3 · Docker · CI/CD

What it is

A professional networking platform designed for performance, scalability, and long-term operational stability.

Key contributions & impact

  • Reliability: Maintained 99.99% uptime using zero-downtime deployment practices.
  • Scaling: Scaled to thousands of active users through caching and background processing.
  • Product capabilities: Built secure content delivery and real-time notification systems.

What I Deliver

AI-driven backend systems

Ruby on Rails, FastAPI, Python

Design and build production backend systems that power AI-driven products and data pipelines.

Reliable infrastructure and deployments

Docker, CI/CD, Terraform, Ansible, AWS, Hetzner, Nginx

Own infrastructure end to end with automated deployments, zero-downtime releases, and monitoring.

Performance and background processing

Redis, caching, background jobs

Improve latency, reliability, and throughput using caching strategies and asynchronous processing.

Production-safe LLM integrations

OpenAI API, LangChain, vector databases

Build AI features with guardrails, cost awareness, and deterministic behavior suitable for production.

End-to-end product ownership

Architecture, delivery, operation

Take products from initial design to deployment and long-term operation without handoffs.

Let's Work Together

Available for full-time engagements with end-to-end ownership and clear outcomes.

Let's Talk View LinkedIn

Email me the problem, expected timeline, and engagement type. I will reply with a plan and next steps.