Azeem Ashraf
Lead Full-Stack Engineer · Fintech & Blockchain · Ex-CTO
Lead full-stack engineer, 8 years in TypeScript and Node across regulated fintech and blockchain. Co-founder & ex-CTO of NIFTRON, a funded tokenization platform. Deep in smart contracts (ERC-20/721/1155, upgradeable proxies, gasless meta-transactions), serverless AWS backends, and KYC/AML systems. Open to senior / lead roles — remote-first, or UAE · Saudi · Singapore · Australia.
Experience
Lead Full-Stack Engineer · Mist Financial (Dijital Team)
Mar 2025 — present
A$3M funds processed · 99% uptime · 10 microservices · 700+ PRs shipped · ~8-engineer team · ASIC / AUSTRAC
- Lead a 10-service Node microservices platform on AWS (identity, KYC/AML, money movement, documents, e-commerce, notifications) for a Banking-as-a-Service product — working directly with the CEO and product, owning technical direction and production releases for an 8-engineer team.
- Built the KYC / AML pipeline end to end; integrated onboarding across Frankieone, DoxAI and Assetora (Lakeba).
- Introduced Claude-based agentic testing for automated bug detection.
Co-Founder & CTO · NIFTRON
Feb 2020 — Feb 2025
10K users · 100K tokens minted · 5 products shipped · led 10 engineers · $285K raised
- Built a blockchain-agnostic Blockchain-as-a-Service platform from zero and wrote every Solidity contract myself — ERC-20/721/1155 with transfer restrictions and role-based access, plus escrow, vesting and timelocks.
- Shipped a developer console, multi-chain SDK, hosted identity & auth, IPFS storage, token explorer and marketplace; Go services for concurrent event indexing on AWS.
- Ran it as a platform and a studio: in-house products (Nexentry KYC, DePro traceability) plus client delivery — CreditNature, Elevate, Amaten, AimChat, UNNE-T.
- Raised $285K (Lankan Angel Network, Spiralation); led engineering, finance and compliance.
Freelance Software & Blockchain Engineer · Self-employed
Apr 2019 — present
- Custom Solidity protocols — EcoFutures: a modular, upgradeable multi-contract protocol tokenizing conservation land easements (forked upgradeable ERC-20, gasless meta-tx, escrow / vesting / dividends), hardened across six production iterations.
- Cross-chain bridge (Ethereum ↔ Polygon), BEP-20 token + NFT domain registry, and an on-chain event indexer for Ink Chain (viem → Prisma / Postgres → GraphQL + WebSocket).
Blockchain Developer · Blockevent
Feb 2019 — May 2020
- Built the asset system representing event tickets as Stellar tokens; research on protocol upgrades and financial smart contracts.
Software Engineering Trainee · 99X Technology (Tracified)
Feb 2018 — Apr 2019
- Built and maintained the Tracified Gateway in Go and Node.js — gorilla/mux routing, goroutines for concurrent chain ingestion, test suites in Mocha and Chai.
Skills
LanguagesTypeScript, JavaScript, Solidity, Go, PHP, Java, Dart, Python, Swift
FrontendReact, React Native, Next.js, Angular, Flutter, Vue
BackendNode, NestJS, Express, GraphQL
BlockchainEVM, Stellar, ERC-20/721/1155, UUPS proxies, EIP-712 meta-tx, ethers.js, Truffle, Hardhat, Foundry
Cloud / DataAWS (Lambda, SQS, API Gateway, DynamoDB, Cognito), Serverless Framework, Docker, Terraform
DatabasesPostgreSQL, MongoDB, DynamoDB, Redis
Education & Certifications
- BSc (Hons) Computer Science & Software Engineering — University of Bedfordshire · First Class Honours
- HND in Information Technology — SLIIT · CGPA 3.82, Dean's List
- Corda Certified Developer (R3) · Publication: Jigsaw — decentralized knowledge sharing
Endorsement
“Takes ownership. Doesn't panic. Works quickly. Takes initiative. Solves problems.”
— Shariq Khwaja, Fractional CTO, Mist Financial