Hi, from London

I'm Ashkan

a | Backend Engineer, ML Engineer, Python Engineer, Real-Time Systems Engineer
Resume
Ashkan Sheikhansari — Backend Engineer
About

Backend engineer. Real-time obsessions.

Based in London, UK
Experience 5 years production
Visa Graduate — valid Jan 2027

Five years building systems that can’t afford to fail. Started at Tejarat Bank — fraud detection for 5 million customers, the kind of job where a missed transaction becomes a news story. Then London: real-time APIs, production ML pipelines, sub-100ms inference.

Now at Anthropic via Alignerr, stress-testing how AI coding agents handle the work that actually breaks real software — ambiguity, silent scope reduction, overconfident claims. Adversarial, high-signal.

Drawn to problems where latency, scale, and correctness all matter at once. Fraud at 300k transactions a day. Distributed state. Inference pipelines. Anywhere “works on my laptop” doesn’t cut it.

Available for full-time backend and ML engineering roles in London. No sponsorship needed until January 2027.

Technical Stack

The tools I reach for first.

Languages & Tools

Python
Bash
Git
GitLab
Rust
Go

Libraries & Frameworks

FastAPI
Django
TensorFlow
scikit-learn
Pandas
NumPy
OpenAI
MLflow

Infrastructure & Data

PostgreSQL
Redis
SQLite
Oracle
Qdrant
Docker
Kubernetes
AWS
RabbitMQ
Prometheus
Grafana
Elasticsearch
Experience

Five years across banks, startups, and AI labs.

Mar 2026 — Present

AI Systems Evaluation Engineer

Alignerr/in partnership with Anthropic/Remote

Design real-world software engineering tasks to evaluate AI coding agents (Claude Code) — backend features, refactors, debugging, test coverage across Python codebases. Score models across 14 engineering-behavior dimensions and construct adversarial scenarios to surface failure modes like overconfidence and silent scope reduction. Qualitative feedback feeds directly into model training.

● Current
Sep 2024 — Feb 2026

Backend Software Engineer

InnoTech Consulting Group/London

Owned the production fraud detection API end to end — FastAPI, Redis, Celery, RabbitMQ, XGBoost, Kubernetes, MLflow. Shipped a loan default model to AWS Lambda with drift-triggered retraining. Built an AI-powered job matching platform with GPT-4o-mini and sentence-transformers. Plus a Django consulting platform that lifted Lighthouse performance by 45%.

Full-time
May 2025 — Jul 2025

Backend Engineer

KodjoEnglish/EdTech/Remote · NY

Contracted to fix database performance issues on a 1,600-student platform. Composite PostgreSQL indexing cut query time from 8s to under 200ms. Shipped FastAPI microservices with JWT/RBAC on Kubernetes with auto-scaling, Qdrant semantic search, GitLab CI/CD, Prometheus + Grafana observability.

Contract
Jan 2021 — Aug 2023

Software Engineer

Tejarat Bank/5M+ customers/Tehran

Built automated fraud detection in Python and Oracle SQL, processing 10,000+ daily transactions. Rule-based anomaly detection and statistical scoring cut manual investigation time by 30%. Tuned Oracle queries and rewrote stored procedures for 40% faster compliance reporting. Integrated Qdrant for fraud pattern similarity, reducing false positives by 25%.

Full-time
Selected Projects

Four projects that taught me how production really works.

Real-Time Fraud Scoring API

End-to-end fraud detection service processing 300,000+ transactions daily at sub-100ms inference. XGBoost + Isolation Forest ensemble with SMOTE on a highly imbalanced dataset (0.1% fraud rate). Full MLOps pipeline with MLflow tracking, drift-triggered retraining, Kubernetes deployment.

<100ms inference 300k+ daily tx 92% recall 0.94 AUC
FastAPI · XGBoost · Redis · RabbitMQ · Kubernetes · MLflow

AI Job Matcher

CV-to-JD semantic matching platform using GPT-4o-mini for skill extraction and sentence-transformers for similarity scoring. Fuzzy matching with 80+ skill synonym mappings. Deployed full-stack on Railway and Vercel with a live demo.

83% match accuracy 80+ skill synonyms Live demo
FastAPI · OpenAI · sentence-transformers · Docker · Vercel

EdTech Query Optimization

Brought in on contract to fix critical database performance at KodjoEnglish (1,600+ students). Composite PostgreSQL indexing cut query time from 8 seconds to under 200ms — a 97% improvement across 50,000+ daily queries. Shipped Kubernetes-deployed FastAPI microservices with Qdrant for semantic content search.

97% faster queries 8s → 200ms 500+ concurrent users
PostgreSQL · FastAPI · Qdrant · Kubernetes · GitLab CI/CD

Async Telegram Music Bot

An async Python bot that delivers music on demand to 1,000+ Telegram users. A user sends a track query, the bot fetches the audio from the upstream source and returns the file. The engineering centre is an SQLite-backed cache layer: repeated queries skip the external API entirely, cutting calls by 60%. Concurrent request handling through asyncio with connection pooling and graceful rate-limit handling. FastAPI management layer, fully Dockerized.

1,000+ users 60% fewer API calls
Python · asyncio · FastAPI · SQLite · Docker
Education

Academic foundations.

Sep 2023 — Sep 2024

MSc Artificial Intelligence

Brunel University London

Dissertation Grade A. Hybrid GRU-CNN architecture for stock market forecasting trained on 1.5M financial records — MAE of 0.145, outperforming the LSTM baseline by 18%. Modules spanned machine learning, deep learning, NLP, computer vision, and reinforcement learning.

2018 — 2022

BSc Software Engineering

Mazandaran University of Science & Technology

Core foundations in Python, data structures & algorithms, statistics, database systems, and AI fundamentals — the groundwork that the MSc built on.

Let's talk

Got a problem
worth solving?

ashkansheikhansari@outlook.com
LinkedIn GitHub +44 7904 878502