Binary Semaphore
Illustrated portrait of Shahid Raza, arms folded, in a cream shirt on a blue background.

Shahid Raza

Software Engineer

Core development

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About

Shahid leads core development at Binary Semaphore. He spends most of his time on the essential complexity of a problem: modeling it well, drawing clean boundaries, and turning that into software that holds up.

Three years of full-stack work, owning modules end to end: data modeling and API design through deployment and the performance work that comes after. Mostly Node.js, NestJS, and TypeScript over MongoDB and PostgreSQL, with React and Next.js on the front, shipped for B2B enterprise clients and US platforms across CMS, LMS, ERP, and community events.

The parts he keeps coming back to are the ones where getting it wrong is expensive: authentication and authorization, payments and subscription billing, database transactions, message queues, and concurrency control.

Outside client work he writes Go, with a soft spot for tools that run on your own machine and the Unix philosophy. inode, the studio's CLI knowledge base, started as one of his side projects.

Experience

  1. Full-Stack Developer

    Jun 2026 - Jul 2026

    SkillSnap Learning (company closed) · Gurugram, India

    Built the course platform and the CRM behind it, then spent the rest of the time making the public site fast.

    • Designed the MongoDB schema for courses and enrollments, the backend data model that the CRM and the public course pages both read from.
    • Moved the CRM to server-side NextAuth sessions with token refresh, rotation, reuse detection, and a grace window per OWASP, holding access tokens in memory rather than localStorage.
    • Migrated fifteen CRM modules from client-side rendering to React Server Components with colocated Server Actions, splitting the remaining client state between React Query and a Zustand store with SSR-safe persistence.
    • Built the YouTube Data API v3 integration behind one HTTP layer with a typed error taxonomy and backoff honoring Retry-After, batching statistics at the API maximum of 50 per call and caching daily with ISR behind a static fallback.
    • Next.js
    • React
    • TypeScript
    • MongoDB
    • NextAuth
    • React Query
    • Zustand

  2. Full-Stack Developer

    Nov 2025 - May 2026

    NewAgeSys Solutions · Kochi, India

    Owned admin modules end to end on two US products: a community events platform and a driving academy.

    • Owned the community admin module of LOCAL-IL, a US community events platform: creation, editing, status switching, organization-initiated email changes, a per-admin activity log, and the dashboard across its aggregation APIs and its UI.
    • Built event and camp management on Next.js server actions with React Hook Form and Zod validation at the boundary, including guest lists, approve and deny on join requests, payment status, and separate cancellation paths for the community and the parent organization.
    • Integrated Stripe for checkout and subscription billing, wrapping each state change in a database transaction so the subscription record and its side effects committed together or not at all.
    • Kept signed contracts and support-ticket attachments in a private S3 bucket, released only as pre-signed URLs issued per request, so no document was ever reachable from a guessable address.
    • Next.js
    • React
    • NestJS
    • Angular
    • PostgreSQL
    • MongoDB
    • Stripe
    • AWS S3

  3. Software Developer

    Apr 2024 - Oct 2025

    TechwareLab · Kochi, India

    Designed and built backend services for B2B enterprise clients, mostly in NestJS and TypeScript.

    • Designed and built Munawel's internal ERP, the HRMS, sales, and invoicing modules, from schema and API design through release, sharing domain models across them instead of duplicating them.
    • Ran GraphQL alongside REST on every project, served from Apollo Server inside NestJS and consumed through Apollo Client, with lookups batched in Sequelize to avoid N+1 queries and subscriptions pushing live notifications.
    • Fronted the NestJS services with a Kong API gateway, authenticating through its JWT plugin against a Kong consumer per user and rate-limiting at the gateway rather than reimplementing it in every service.
    • Built the NetSuite integration for Infithra, a UAE HR and payroll platform, keeping payroll data in sync across the two systems.
    • NestJS
    • TypeScript
    • GraphQL
    • Apollo
    • Kong
    • PostgreSQL
    • Sequelize
    • Docker

  4. Junior Software Developer

    Apr 2023 - Apr 2024

    TechwareLab · Kochi, India

    Backend work across client projects, moving from supervised tickets to owning features end to end.

    • Built REST APIs and backend services for B2B enterprise clients including XLRI and Kinderpass, in two-week Scrum sprints tracked in Jira.
    • Modeled and built the MongoDB data layer behind the CMS, LMS, and payment-transaction modules, from collection and document design through the queries the application ran against them.
    • Integrated Stripe, Razorpay, and Paytm checkout flows, modeling transaction states so a payment was never ambiguous, with failure and retry handling.
    • Cut latency on the hottest read paths by caching them in Redis and reshaping the queries behind them, across PostgreSQL, MySQL, and MongoDB.
    • Node.js
    • NestJS
    • TypeScript
    • MongoDB
    • Redis
    • Stripe
    • Docker
    • Jira

Projects

Education

Certifications

Skills

Languages
  • TypeScript
  • JavaScript
  • Go
  • Python
  • Java
Backend
  • Node.js
  • NestJS
  • Express
  • REST
  • GraphQL
  • Apollo Server
  • WebSockets
  • Microservices
  • Swagger/OpenAPI
  • JWT
  • OAuth2
  • RBAC
Frontend
  • React
  • Next.js
  • Server Components
  • SSR/SSG/ISR
  • Redux
  • React Query
  • Zustand
  • React Hook Form
  • Zod
  • Apollo Client
  • Radix UI
  • shadcn/ui
  • Tailwind CSS
  • Angular
Data
  • PostgreSQL
  • MongoDB
  • MySQL
  • Redis
  • Mongoose
  • Sequelize
  • Drizzle
  • pgvector
  • sqlite-vec
Architecture
  • SOLID
  • Dependency injection
  • Layered architecture
  • Event-driven architecture
  • Transactional outbox
  • Database transactions
  • Concurrency control
  • System design
Infrastructure
  • Docker
  • AWS (EC2, S3, Lambda)
  • Kafka
  • Kong API Gateway
  • Nginx
  • GitHub Actions
  • CI/CD
  • Git
  • PM2
  • Linux
AI
  • LLM integration
  • Embeddings
  • Vector search
  • RAG
  • MCP
  • Claude API
  • Ollama
Payments
  • Stripe
  • Razorpay
  • Paytm
Meet the rest of the team