Sr. Full-Stack & AI Platform Engineer — Team Lead
Amer Hamdan
Ten years of production web systems, and for the last stretch mostly AI platform work: an intelligence platform whose pipeline clusters, extracts, and briefs with LLMs, an OpenAI-compatible gateway that puts six model providers behind one token, a copilot with tools, memory, and retrieval, autonomous content agents. Before that, mostly migrations — taking something slow and legacy and rebuilding it without ever turning it off.
- Based
- Istanbul, Türkiye
- Remote-friendly
- Open to
- Senior full-stack · AI platform
- Tech lead · Architecture
- Core stack
- Go · TypeScript · Next.js
- LLM gateways · RAG · PostgreSQL · GCP
- Span
- 2016 — present
- Ten years in production
- Building for production
- 10 yrsBuilding for production2016 — Present
- Performance gain
- +70%Performance gainWordPress → Next.js rebuild
- Active SaaS users
- 1,000+Active SaaS usersAmenu, built solo
- LLM providers behind one gateway
- 6LLM providers behind one gatewayMulti-provider routing layer
Profile
Senior full-stack and AI platform engineer and team lead with ten years building production web platforms across intelligence, news, recruitment, and commerce. Currently lead engineer on a multi-product platform written in Go and TypeScript: an LLM pipeline that turns news and social feeds into narratives, entities, events, and bilingual briefings; an OpenAI-compatible gateway routing six model providers with hybrid retrieval, translation, and per-token billing; and a copilot with tool calling, memory, and deep research — all over PostgreSQL, deployed to GKE and Cloud Run. Works agent-first day to day, running teams of Claude Code agents alongside Cursor, Codex, and Gemini CLI. Earlier work was mostly legacy migration: PHP to Laravel, WordPress to Next.js, with measurable gains in performance and engagement each time.
Work history
- 2023→ now
Senior Full-Stack Developer / Team Lead
ID8 Media · Istanbul, Türkiye
Lead engineer across the agency portfolio — Go and TypeScript platform services, LLM infrastructure, AI pipelines and agents, client dashboards, and large-scale hiring products.
- Lead engineer on a large intelligence platform: Go services behind GraphQL, REST, and WebSocket APIs over PostgreSQL, with a bilingual Arabic/English Next.js dashboard.
- Built its AI pipeline: embedding-based clustering of articles into narratives, entity and event extraction, theme scoring, and LLM-written bilingual briefings, run as database-driven workflow steps.
- Built an OpenAI-compatible LLM gateway routing six model providers behind a single token, with per-token metering, billing, spend limits, translation, and hybrid retrieval on pgvector and BM25.
- Shipped an in-product copilot with tool calling, memory, file attachments (PDF, OCR), and deep research, plus a quality checker that scores its answers with an LLM judge against a golden question set.
- Raised project success rate 25% by leading development teams through 5 complex, concurrent client builds.
- Improved software efficiency 15% for news agencies by engineering tailored publishing and content-delivery solutions.
- Own the delivery pipeline across clients: architecture, code review, Terraform-managed GKE and Cloud Run deploys, and post-launch performance.
- Go
- TypeScript
- Next.js
- PostgreSQL
- LLM infrastructure
- RAG
- AI agents
- Google Cloud
- 2021→ now
Web Lead & Site Administrator
Multifaith Alliance · New York, United States (remote)
Rebuilt and now maintain the public platform for a US non-profit working across the MENA region.
- Improved site performance 70% by rebuilding the entire site with Next.js and Tailwind CSS.
- Migrated a legacy WordPress installation to a fully custom modern stack with no loss of content or search ranking.
- Built dynamic page types and a reusable component system the non-profit's staff can extend without a developer.
- Reworked SEO structure, page-load speed, responsive behaviour, and production deployment.
- Next.js
- Tailwind CSS
- SEO
- Migration
- Core Web Vitals
- 2020→ now
Founder & CEO
Amenu (SaaS) · Global
Menu-management SaaS for restaurants, designed, built, and operated solo.
- Grew to 1,000+ active users, demonstrating real market adoption without a sales team.
- Shipped three major versions, each iterating on features, onboarding, and performance from live usage data.
- Built and run the full stack independently — product, front end, back end, billing, infrastructure, and support.
- SaaS
- Product ownership
- Full-stack
- Multi-tenant
- 2021→ 2023
Head of Developers Team
Orient News · Dubai, United Arab Emirates
Led the engineering team behind the digital transformation of a major regional news agency.
- Increased user engagement 30% by leading the development of a new website for a major news agency.
- Boosted platform performance 30% by migrating the newsroom from native PHP to Laravel.
- Built and led the development team from scratch, setting review standards and release process.
- Owned the SEO strategy and content architecture, growing organic traffic and improving Core Web Vitals.
- Laravel
- PHP
- Next.js
- Technical SEO
- Team building
- 2016→ 2021
Head of Developers
Alpha Creative Agency · Istanbul, Türkiye
Ran the programming team at a full-service creative agency.
- Delivered 21+ production websites across client industries.
- Led the programming team day to day, from scoping through delivery and handover.
- Designed and implemented admin panels and front-end interfaces for clients with no in-house technical staff.
- PHP
- Team leadership
- Admin systems
- Front-end
Also, over the same years
- 2020→ now
SEO & Technical Consultant — Freelance
Global
Delivered comprehensive site status analyses for 100 clients, translating audits into ranked action lists.
- 2020→ 2021
Senior Consultant — Inhouse Global
Istanbul, Türkiye
Increased user engagement 30% by developing a fully functional website from scratch.
- 2019→ 2020
Full-Stack Web Developer — Job2Go Recruitment Agency
Wales, United Kingdom
Reduced downtime 30% by defining the site roadmap and establishing robust server infrastructure.
- 2018→ 2019
Full-Stack Web Developer — Questionnaire Connect
United States (remote)
Increased survey response rate 35% by developing a purpose-built web application for Questionnaire Connect®.
Selected projects
LLM pipeline and copilot in production
AI intelligence platform
ID8 Media · 2026 — Present
An intelligence product that collects news and social feeds and turns them into alerts, narratives, events, entity networks, and briefings for analysts, in Arabic and English, with a copilot that answers questions over the same data.
- Cluster-first narrative pipeline: articles are embedded, clustered, then enriched by LLM steps defined as database-driven workflows
- Entity and event extraction, theme scoring over article embeddings, and vector search across the corpus
- Copilot with tool calling, conversation memory and context compaction, file attachments (PDF, OCR), and deep research
- Hourly quality checker: golden question set, citation link checks, and an LLM judge scoring every answer
- Every model call goes through one gateway seam, so providers and models change without touching the product
- Go
- Next.js
- PostgreSQL
- pgvector
- Embeddings
- LLM pipelines
- Copilot
- NATS
Six providers behind one token
LLM gateway
ID8 Media · 2026 — Present
An OpenAI-compatible, stream-first AI gateway that sits between model providers and the products that use them. Products hold one gateway token; provider keys, routing, metering, and billing live in the gateway.
- Chat, embeddings, and models endpoints in the OpenAI shape with SSE streaming, routed to Gemini, OpenAI, Anthropic, Grok, Perplexity, or Ollama
- Hybrid RAG in Postgres: pgvector HNSW for dense search and ParadeDB BM25 for lexical, no separate vector database
- Per-token usage metering, pricing, spend limits, and rate limits, with an AgentOps dashboard and OpenTelemetry tracing
- Cache-first Arabic/English translation, a multi-step orchestrator, and web-search and deep-research provider tools
- MCP servers for admin and user access, plus Go and TypeScript SDKs for consumers
- Go
- OpenAI-compatible API
- RAG
- pgvector
- BM25
- MCP
- SSE
- OpenTelemetry
Autonomous agent pipeline, Arabic-first
Maestro
Independent · 2026 — Present
An autonomous AI social-media agency for the Arabic market. Agents research, plan, write, and schedule a brand's output end to end, with a human approving rather than authoring.
- Agent pipeline covering research, content planning, generation, and scheduling
- Arabic-only product surface — RTL, correct script shaping, dialect-aware copy
- Provider abstraction with deterministic mock models, so the pipeline is testable without spend
- Documented as a code-accurate engineering guide that AI agents navigate directly
- TypeScript
- AI agents
- LLM orchestration
- PostgreSQL
- Next.js
- RTL
Multi-tenant commerce SaaS, built solo
Medhat Pasha
Independent · 2026 — Present
Multi-tenant e-commerce platform for the Syrian market — a single engine powering unlimited Arabic storefronts, built for merchants with no technical staff and tuned for slow connections.
- Arabic-first interface with full RTL support throughout
- Monorepo: Node.js and Express TypeScript API alongside the storefront
- Cash-on-delivery order flow matched to how the local market actually buys
- Automated WebP optimisation and real-time analytics on a 3G performance budget
- TypeScript
- Next.js
- Express
- Multi-tenant
- Monorepo
- RTL
Hourly ingestion across three platforms
Social listening dashboards
ID8 Media · 2025 — 2026
Media-monitoring dashboards that ingest X, Instagram, and Facebook and surface sentiment, trending topics, and emerging hashtags for communications teams.
- Automated hourly collection into Firestore, triggered by Cloud Scheduler
- Sentiment detection and trend analysis over mixed social and news sources
- Grid dashboards built for analysts rather than engineers
- Next.js 15, Tailwind, and shadcn/ui on Cloud Run
- Next.js
- TypeScript
- Firebase
- Sentiment analysis
- Cloud Scheduler
Unblocked front-end work with no live feed
Social API engine simulator
ID8 Media · 2025
A generator that produces realistic social posts, usernames, metrics, and timestamps from Gemini, so dashboards and pipelines could be built and demoed before any live data existed.
- Gemini-generated post text and personas with code-generated metadata
- Realistic metrics, timestamps, and context annotations
- Firebase-backed store shaped exactly like the production feed
- Next.js
- TypeScript
- Gemini
- Firebase
- shadcn/ui
Front end and API, ~200 commits
YOHO Works
ID8 Media · 2025
Global hiring platform covering multi-region job data, employer workflows, and candidate matching, delivered as a Next.js front end against a TypeScript API.
- Multi-region job data models and employer workflows
- Candidate-facing search and application flow
- Shared component system reused across the agency portfolio
- Next.js
- TypeScript
- Node.js
- REST APIs
Six repositories, front to back
Reson8
ID8 Media · 2023 — Present
Media platform spanning a client panel, admin tooling, an elections API, and serverless functions, later re-architected onto Go with its own database and message bus.
- Client and admin panels in Next.js and TypeScript
- Firebase Cloud Functions for scheduled and event-driven work
- Elections API delivering live results under load
- Re-architecture onto a Go service with dedicated Postgres and NATS
- TypeScript
- Go
- Next.js
- Firebase
- PHP
Five surfaces on one content backend
bluHub
ID8 Media · 2024 — 2025
Multi-surface platform for an organisation: public site, a Strapi-backed CMS its staff run themselves, an admin panel, a REST API, and a separate jobs portal.
- Next.js public site and jobs portal sharing one component system
- Strapi CMS so non-technical staff publish without a developer
- Admin panel and REST API behind role-based access
- Next.js
- TypeScript
- Strapi
- Node.js
- CMS
Live storefront plus social publishing
Cuties Baby Store
Independent · 2026 — Present
Arabic-first online store for baby and infant products, serving Damascus and the wider Syrian market, with a connected social layer that publishes straight to Facebook and Instagram.
- Encrypted Meta (Facebook/Instagram) connection with credentials stored outside the release directory
- Role-based page access, cached per worker under PM2 cluster mode
- GA4 and Tag Manager e-commerce tracking on a documented event convention
- Deploy layout that survives directory-replacing releases without losing state
- Next.js
- TypeScript
- Meta API
- PM2
- GA4
- RTL
Two languages, two editorial workflows
Marasid
ID8 Media · 2024 — 2025
Bilingual Arabic and English publication platform: a Next.js front end over Strapi, with a separate CMS instance per language so each editorial team works independently.
- Arabic and English sites sharing one front-end codebase
- Per-language Strapi instances for independent editorial control
- RTL and LTR layouts from the same component system
- Next.js
- TypeScript
- Strapi
- Bilingual
- RTL
Public repository, no hardcoded secrets
Notification Forwarder
Open source · 2026
A self-hosted Android app that forwards your own phone's SMS, call events, and app notifications to a Telegram chat you control — for reading a spare, travel, or backup device without picking it up.
- Native Android in Java, with per-user configuration
- No hardcoded credentials — every user supplies their own bot and chat
- Built as a personal tool and published for anyone with the same problem
- Java
- Android
- Telegram API
- Open source
+30% engagement · +30% platform performance
Orient News Platform
Orient News · 2021 — 2023
Full digital transformation of a regional news agency: legacy native PHP rebuilt on Laravel, then a Next.js front end on top for speed and search.
- Migrated the newsroom off native PHP without interrupting publishing
- Built and led the engineering team from zero
- Restructured content architecture and technical SEO
- Optimised Core Web Vitals across article and index pages
- Laravel
- PHP
- Next.js
- React
- SEO
+70% site performance
Multifaith Alliance
2021 — Present
Complete rebuild of a US non-profit's public platform, moving from WordPress to a custom Next.js and Tailwind stack with a reusable component system.
- WordPress → Next.js migration with content and rankings preserved
- Dynamic page types staff can compose without a developer
- SEO structure and page-load rework
- Responsive design and production deployment pipeline
- Next.js
- Tailwind CSS
- TypeScript
- Migration
- SEO
What I build with
- Languages
- TypeScript
- JavaScript
- Go
- PHP
- Python
- SQL
- Java
- AI engineering
- LLM gateway architecture
- OpenAI-compatible APIs
- Multi-provider routing (OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, Grok, Perplexity, Ollama)
- Agent & multi-agent orchestration
- Copilots with memory
- Deep research agents
- Model Context Protocol (MCP)
- Hybrid RAG (pgvector HNSW + BM25)
- Embeddings & clustering
- Structured outputs & tool calling
- Streaming responses (SSE)
- LLM workflow pipelines
- Prompt engineering
- LLM-as-judge evaluation & golden sets
- Token metering, spend limits & cost control
- LLM observability (OpenTelemetry)
- Sentiment, entity & event extraction
- OCR (Tesseract)
- Machine translation
- AI-assisted delivery
- Claude Code
- Cursor
- OpenAI Codex
- Gemini CLI
- Antigravity CLI
- MCP servers
- Coding-agent teams (subagents, skills)
- Agent-assisted refactoring & review
- Spec-driven development
- Repo conventions for coding agents
- Backend
- Node.js
- Express.js
- Go (Cobra)
- Laravel (PHP)
- Strapi
- REST API design
- GraphQL
- WebSockets
- NATS
- Authentication
- Role & permission systems
- Caching
- Frontend
- React
- Next.js (App Router)
- TypeScript
- Tailwind CSS
- shadcn/ui
- Material UI
- Responsive design
- Bilingual EN/AR & RTL
- Accessible layouts
- UI/UX
- Data
- PostgreSQL
- MySQL
- MongoDB
- Firestore
- Prisma ORM
- pgvector
- Schema design
- Migrations
- Cloud & DevOps
- Google Cloud Run
- Cloud Build
- Cloud Scheduler
- GKE / Kubernetes
- Terraform
- Docker
- Nginx
- PM2
- Linux server management
- CI/CD pipelines
- Git & GitHub
- Practice
- Technical & on-page SEO
- Core Web Vitals
- Team leadership
- Monorepos
- Multi-tenant architecture
- Agile / Scrum
- Jira, Trello, Slack
- Languages
- ArabicNativeEnglishProfessional working proficiencyTurkishAdvanced
Take the CV with you
Open to senior full-stack, AI platform, and tech lead roles — remote or Istanbul. The fastest way to reach me is email — I answer within a day.
- PDFAmer-Hamdan-CV.pdfFor humans and applicant tracking systems
- JSONcv.jsonJSON Resume schema
- Plain textAmer-Hamdan-CV.txtUnstyled, for any parser
The JSON follows the JSON Resume schema, so an applicant tracking system or an AI agent can read the whole record without parsing a document. There is a /llms.txt too, and the CV is also a plain web page.
- Phone / WhatsApp
- +90 553 327 11 00
- GitHub
- github.com/amerhamdan3
- linkedin.com/in/amerhamdan3