Bilal Ahmed
Engineering Manager · Payments & Platform Infrastructure
Lahore, Pakistan (UTC+5) · contact@bilal-ahmed.me · linkedin.com/in/biah · bilal-ahmed.me
Open to relocation: Netherlands / EU, UK, UAE · Available immediately
Profile
Engineering leader with 20+ years building production systems, including four and a half years at Pagos Solutions, a US payments-infrastructure company, first as Technical Lead and then as Engineering Manager. Led a distributed backend, data and DevOps team that owned network tokenization, account updater and high-volume payment-data platforms across Visa, Mastercard, Discover and American Express. Brings the operating discipline regulated payments needs — weekly releases, SLOs, on-call, PCI DSS and SOC 2 readiness — and stays hands-on enough to make the architecture calls.
Selected results at Pagos
- Contributed to a 5–7.5% improvement in card-not-present approval rates through network tokenization across all four major card networks.
- Contributed to an approximately 33% reduction in updater-addressable recurring-payment declines through a unified multi-network account updater.
- Led platforms ingesting and analysing millions of card-not-present transactions per month, serving merchants including Adobe, Eventbrite, GoFundMe, McAfee and StubHub.
Experience
Pagos Solutions, Inc.May 2021 – Oct 2025
US payments infrastructure, remote · Full-time, 40 hrs/week (contract engagement)
Engineering Manager (reporting to the CPTO)Jun 2023 – Oct 2025
- Led a distributed team of backend, data and DevOps engineers across time zones: 1:1s, growth planning, delivery planning and stakeholder alignment with Product, Data and QA.
- Owned the network tokenization platform (Visa VTS, Mastercard MDES/SCOF, Discover Tokenization, Amex DDX) and the multi-network account updater (Visa VAU, Mastercard ABU/RTAU, Discover GAU, Amex Cardrefresher).
- Ran onboarding and certification directly with Visa, Mastercard, Discover and Amex.
- Integrated Visa Verifi Order Insight so merchants could share enriched transaction detail with issuers on friendly-fraud disputes.
- Ran weekly releases on Terraform and GitHub Actions with testing gates; owned PagerDuty rotations, SLOs, runbooks and post-incident reviews, with Datadog observability.
- Supported PCI DSS and SOC 2 readiness through secure SDLC, access control, change management, logging and audit evidence.
Technical Lead (reporting to the CTO)May 2021 – May 2023
- Led architecture and delivery of network tokenization across four card networks and designed the unified account updater service.
- Built a near-real-time payment-data ingestion pipeline from global payment processors on AWS (Python, Lambda, SQS, RDS, Redshift), feeding analytics and merchant dashboards.
- Defined cloud-native service architecture (.NET Core and Python on Fargate and Lambda); mentored engineers on design, code quality and incident response while staying hands-on.
Synvra — Founder (part-time)Oct 2025 – Present
Built a compliance-focused laboratory information management system for ISO/IEC 17025 testing laboratories: sample-to-report workflow, controlled review and approval, audit evidence and instrument governance (Django, PostgreSQL, AWS). Hosted and at pilot stage; now part-time.
FQEFlix — Co-Founder, product & engineering (part-time)Mar 2026 – Present
Lead architecture, subscription and access systems for a live subscription video-learning platform on web and mobile.
Barbican LLC — Senior Technical Lead (contract)Mar 2020 – Apr 2021
Led design and delivery of an AI-assisted SOAR platform integrating SIEM telemetry, threat intelligence and automated response workflows.
UNDP / GEF — Ministry of Climate Change, Pakistan — System Architect (contract)Aug 2020 – Dec 2020
Designed the architecture, data model and requirements for a national Environmental Information Management System used by multiple agencies.
Securencrypt — Technical Lead / Lead Software Architect (contract)Dec 2011 – Feb 2020
Led architecture and development of endpoint protection, encryption and secure-storage products, with emphasis on ransomware defence.
Aegispeak — Founder2004 – Present
Software engineering company in Lahore with clients in North America, Europe and the Middle East; strategic involvement only.
Earlier: Freelance security and Windows software development (2003 – 2011); Software Engineer, Premium Telecom (2002 – 2003).
Technical
- Payments
- Visa VTS & VAU · Mastercard MDES, SCOF, ABU/RTAU · Discover Tokenization & GAU · Amex DDX & Cardrefresher · Verifi Order Insight · card-network onboarding & certification · PCI DSS
- Cloud & infrastructure
- AWS (Lambda, Fargate, ECS, SQS, S3, RDS, Redshift, Athena, EventBridge, Step Functions) · Terraform · Docker · Kubernetes · GitHub Actions
- Languages & data
- Python · C# / .NET Core · SQL · JavaScript · PostgreSQL · SQL Server · MySQL · Redshift · Kafka · Redis · Django
- Operations
- Datadog · PagerDuty · SLOs · incident response & post-incident review · secure SDLC · SOC 2 readiness
Education
- Executive MBA, with Honors — Quantic School of Business and Technology, 2026
- MSc Artificial Intelligence Engineering — Quantic School of Business and Technology, Expected 2027
- MS Computer Science (Software Engineering) — Hamdard University, Karachi, 2002 · CGPA 3.64/4.0, Dean’s Honor List
- BSc Mathematics & Physics — University of the Punjab, Lahore, 1999
Work authorisation & languages
Non-EU national: requires employer sponsorship (Dutch Highly Skilled Migrant permit, EU Blue Card, UK Skilled Worker or UAE employment visa). Can start immediately, remotely via an employer-of-record or contract while the permit is processed. English (fluent), Urdu (native).