Saiful Islam
Staff Engineer | Lead Application Developer
Professional Summary
Staff Engineer and "Force Multiplier" with 9+ years of experience architecting high-throughput distributed systems. Specialist in solving Organizational-level Complexity through Platform Engineering, Architectural Governance, and Performance Strategy. Proven track record of evolving infrastructure to handle 500K+ RPM (8k+ RPS) while reducing Time-to-Market by 40% through standardized developer platforms. Expert at bridging business strategy with deep technical execution, instituting RFC cultures and Domain-Driven Design across multi-team organizations.
Engineering Impact & Scalability
Technical Leadership & Platform Strategy
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High-Scale Distributed Systems
Architecting event-driven backends using Kafka and Redis for mission-critical data processing. Specialist in distributed consistency, idempotency, and solving CAP theorem trade-offs at scale.
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Internal Developer Platforms (IDP)
Scaling engineering velocity by building shared infrastructure-as-code (IaC) templates, automated quality gates, and centralized observability stacks used by multiple product teams.
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Architectural Governance & DDD
Guiding the transition from legacy monoliths to Modular Monoliths and Microservices. Leveraging Domain-Driven Design (DDD) to enforce strict boundaries and reduce team coupling.
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Cross-Org Mentorship & RFCs
Championing a culture of documented alignment through RFC (Request for Comments). Mentoring Senior Engineers and defining technical career ladders across the organization.
Professional Experience
Lead Application Developer | RankMyList
2023 – PresentKey Focus: Platform Engineering, Multi-Org Strategy, Cloud Architecture, Mentorship, Cost Optimization
- Architectural Governance: Spearheaded the transition of the core platform to a Modular Monolith architecture, reducing cross-team development conflicts by 40% and establishing strict domain encapsulation via static analysis tools.
- Global Scale Infrastructure: Engineered a high-availability roadmap using Redis & Kafka to handle peak traffic of 500K+ RPM, implementing sophisticated circuit-breaking and rate-limiting strategies to protect downstream services.
- Mentorship & Culture: Defined the technical career ladder for the engineering org and mentored 5+ Senior Engineers, shifting the culture toward decentralized decision-making through standardizing the RFC process.
- Platform Cost Efficiency: Architected a multi-tenant cloud-native infrastructure on GCP, achieving 99.99% availability while reducing operational OpEx by 20% through rightsizing and managed service migration.
- Enterprise Integration: Led the technical architecture for DeshiCraft.com.bd, designing a secure, high-throughput vendor-integration API that reduced onboarding time by 60% and directly increased profitability by 25%.
Senior Software Engineer | RankMyList
2020 – 2023Key Focus: Event-Driven Systems, Org-wide Standards, Observability
- Unified Notification Infrastructure: Architected a centralized Real-time Notification Engine supporting 500M+ monthly events, delivering sub-second latency with effectively exactly-once delivery via idempotent consumers and transaction-aware producers across 4 product lines.
- Engineering Excellence: Introduced and scaled the RFC process across the engineering org, doubling cumulative team delivery output by unifying architectural patterns and reducing redundant rework.
- Observability Strategy: Implemented a standardized telemetry stack (ELK/Prometheus), reducing Mean Time to Detection (MTTD) of production incidents by 50% across the platform ecosystem.
Software Engineer | RankMyList
2017 – 2020Focus: Backend Engineering, Database Tuning, Legacy Optimization
- Performance Tuning: Optimized core database schemas and API query patterns, reducing response times by 30% and significantly improving mobile application retention metrics.
- Full-Stack Implementation: Delivered critical modular features for the flagship RankMyList platform, maintaining a 100% adherence rate to engineering best practices and technical specifications.
Architectural Portfolio
Multi-Channel Notification Hub
A platform-agnostic, event-driven service built for extreme low-latency. Utilized Kafka for message queuing to ensure reliable delivery at scale.
Cloud-Native E-Commerce Core
Modernization of a retail platform using GCP and Docker. Focused on elastic scaling and high-availability database replication.
Engineering Toolkit
Education
B.Sc. in Computer Science & Engineering
Premier University Chittagong, Bangladesh