Talha Habib
Verified Expert in Engineering
TypeScript Developer
Faisalabad City, Punjab, Pakistan
Toptal member since March 8, 2022
Talha is a staff full-stack JavaScript engineer with 14+ years of experience building and scaling web, mobile, fintech, AI, and enterprise platforms. He specializes in JavaScript, TypeScript, Node.js, React, Next.js, NestJS, AWS, PostgreSQL, Redis, RabbitMQ, and microservices. Talha has a proven record of modernizing legacy systems, delivering products from 0 to 1, and leading engineering teams of 20+ members while remaining hands-on in front-end and back-end architecture.
Portfolio
Experience
- TypeScript - 10 years
- Express.js - 8 years
- Node.js - 8 years
- Next.js - 6 years
- React - 6 years
- Sequelize - 6 years
- Tailwind CSS - 5 years
- PostgreSQL - 5 years
Preferred Environment
Next.js, TypeScript, Node.js, React
The most amazing...
...achievement is single-handedly building the startup Lighthouse from the ground up for 3+ years—now thriving with 200+ employees and rich technical solutions.
Work Experience
Senior Software Architect
Biirdee
- Served as the founding engineer and sole technical lead, delivering a travel platform, CRM, automation, and cloud infrastructure.
- Automated 7 airfare optimization strategies and reduced booking turnaround from 2–5 days to 2–5 minutes.
- Increased booking throughput from 1–2 to 10–15 bookings/week.
- Designed a Puppeteer cluster (25 browsers, 375 tabs) to guarantee high availability for concurrent operations.
Principal Engineer
Swipey
- Led 3 engineers and 2 QA while modernizing the fintech platform using event-driven architecture.
- Engineered a custom RabbitMQ/Redis queue framework with retries, FIFO, and idempotent processing.
- Reduced cloud cost by 76% (from $5,000 to $1,200 per month) by architecting EKS and centralized queue infrastructure.
- Improved deployment reliability to over 99% uptime and eliminated recurring race-condition incidents.
Lead Software Engineer
Grab Holdings
- Architected an AI-assisted AWS incident routing platform, saving an estimated 60–100 engineering hours weekly.
- Introduced ABAC/RBAC policy and control systems for OAuth and OPA.
- Reduced incident resolution from days to under an hour using RAG, GenAI, and an internal knowledge base.
- Designed a centralized access governance platform for thousands of internal databases.
- Led 6 engineers delivering internal automation platforms.
Principal Engineer
Zad Group
- Managed an engineering team of 4 software engineers and 1 QA.
- Delivered an education platform from 0 to 1 with 13,000–20,000 MAU and 5,000–7,000 downloads.
- Reduced front-end build time from 15 to 2 minutes by migrating the front end to Vite.
- Contributed as a full-stack JavaScript engineer to the education and vet team, and got deliveries done.
- Introduced engineering standards, CI/CD, automated testing, and AWS CDK deployments.
Engineering Manager
Hotel Engine
- Managed a distributed engineering team delivering travel integrations.
- Introduced XP engineering practices, including mob programming, enabling delivery ahead of schedule.
- Integrated Amadeus, Sabre, and GIATA services through REST APIs and microservices.
- Supported growth of an estimated 2,000–5,000 additional customers per month.
Lead Software Engineer | Engineering Manager
Lighthouse
- Was the first engineering hire, and later led a team of 6 engineers.
- Designed geospatial search (polygon, radius, bounding box) and payment workflows supporting cashback.
- Built over 95% of the company's products and internal platforms.
- Processed around 80,000 property records per day. Reduced a 200-person manual image operation to 4 through AI automation.
- Reduced deployment time from 30 minutes to 90 seconds, using AWS CDK, GitHub Actions, and automated CI/CD.
Lead Software Engineer
J. K. Group of Companies
- Built an SMS gateway using Arduino and hardware interfacing.
- Redesigned and upgraded the internal infrastructure, tools, and web apps to avail the benefits of trending technologies.
- Developed an industrial truck weight system, cutting outsource cost by 75%.
- Contributed to internal ERP systems in Node.js and React.
Lead Software Engineer
Brickclay
- Increased graphics production from 5–10 to 200–500 assets per day through automation.
- Handled the overall engineering process of development, deployment, and design.
- Integrated external API to help sell icons via uploading on remote platforms such as Shopify, GraphicRiver, and IconFinder.
- Designed autonomous icon uploads via Puppeteer to websites not powered by API.
Software Engineer
Ranksol
- Developed a Twilio-based IVR to handle the automated calls.
- Programmed WordPress plugins, with up to 100,000 copies sold on CodeCanyon and the official WordPress directory.
- Engineered an early WhatsApp API integration for LMS systems.
- Integrated and developed a T-Shirt design app and on-page web editors to help with faster uploads.
Software Engineer
01 Objects
- Developed Hotel Management System that integrates with push notification.
- Developed the attendance system that integrates with biometric devices.
- Designed and developed custom MVC frameworks to use as internal boilerplates for future development.
Experience
Lighthouse Mobile App
Puppeteer-based Facebook Instant Game Engine
GSM USB to SMS Service Integration Tool
Icooons
Lighthouse Chrome Extension
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/lighthouse/cfkinobccokockgkggkabfaldlhojbioEducation
Master's Degree in Computer Science
National College of Business Administration and Economics (NCBAE) - Lahore, Pakistan
Pre-bachelor Intermediate Degree in Computer Science
Government College University Faisalabad (GCUF) - Faisalabad, Pakistan
High School Diploma in Mathematics and Computer Science
BISE Lahore Board - Lahore, Pakistan
Certifications
TestDome Certificate of Achievement – JavaScript
TestDome
Skills
Libraries/APIs
Node.js, React, Puppeteer, EJS, REST APIs, Google Maps API, Sockets, Stripe, Stripe API, Vue, Google Maps, ImageMagick, Socket.IO, jQuery, Amazon Merchant API, Shopify API, WhatsApp API
Tools
Slack, Sequelize, Google Sheets, Puppet, Git, Sentry, AWS Command Line Interface (CLI), Figma, Oh My Zsh, Inkscape, PhpMyAdmin, Terraform, RabbitMQ, Celery
Languages
TypeScript, JavaScript, SQL, HTML, Sass, CSS, Python, PHP, Java
Frameworks
Next.js, Tailwind CSS, React Native, Express.js, Swagger, Jest, CodeIgniter 3, CodeIgniter, Bootstrap, Django
Paradigms
REST, Unit Testing, Agile, Test-driven Development (TDD), Microservices
Platforms
iOS, Android, Algolia, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Docker, Firebase, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Mobile, Google AppSheet, MacOS, WordPress, Twilio, AWS Lambda
Storage
MongoDB, NoSQL, Redis, MySQL, Elasticsearch, PostgreSQL, Amazon DynamoDB
Other
JSDOM, Learning Management Systems (LMS), Leadership, Software Architecture, Full-stack Development, MERN Stack, Full-stack, Technical Leadership, APIs, Team Leadership, Back-end, Axios, Airtable, Mobile First, Styled-components, API Integration, Front-end, Front-end Development, CTO, Data Analytics, Data Analysis, Data Engineering, Web Scraping, Chrome Extensions, CSS Grid, Amazon RDS, Cloud, CI/CD Pipelines, Geofencing, Geolocation, Architecture, Finance, OAuth, Facebook Ads, SVG Animation, SVG, GSM, Data Compression, Image Processing, Software, Programming, Computer Science, Mobile Apps, VPS/VDS, Interactive Voice Response (IVR), WordPress Plugins, WordPress Themes, Hotels & Lodging, PSD to HTML, SMS Bots, Lambda Functions
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