# Backend brain. AI heart. 14+ years of shipping.

- Canonical: https://ansezz.com/about/
- Markdown: https://ansezz.com/about/index.md
- Description: Senior backend engineer and AI engineer with 14+ years of experience, remote-only since 2014. Multi-tenant B2B SaaS, Shopify Plus apps, and production AI on Laravel.

▸ About

I'm Anass: senior lead backend engineer, software architect, and AI engineer. Remote-only since 2014. I help founders, agencies, and product teams ship Laravel SaaS, Shopify Plus apps, and AI features that survive real users.

          Open for scoped builds — MVP, AI sprint, Shopify app, architecture audit

▸ Heads up

Remote-first since 2014. GMT+8, but I adapt to your zone.

      01

## By the numbers.

Receipts before opinions. The kind of numbers that hold up under procurement review.

- 14+   Years shipping
- 60+   Production builds
- 3   Continents served
- 10+   Shopify apps (public + private)
- 100%   Remote since 2014
- 1   Time zone (GMT+8)

      02

## How I actually work.

Three phases. No agile theater, no surprise scope creep. Boring, predictable, ships.

1. ### Discover   1-week deep dive. Codebase audit, architecture review, risk + cost report, 12-week remediation plan. Honest scope before any code.
2. ### Build   TDD with Pest. Architecture-first. Production-ready from sprint one. Daily deploys, observability, incident-ready. No demoware.
3. ### Hand off   Docs, runbooks, eval harnesses, pair sessions with your team. Your engineers ship the next feature without me. That's the win.

      03

## From PHP scripts to AI agents.

14 years building products for teams that needed them to work. Not in a demo, not in a slide deck. On day three, when the cron job dies and the customer is angry. That taught me the rule I still ship by: observable infra costs less than incident response, and async architecture beats timezone friction every time.

   "Boring fundamentals, opinionated defaults, the smallest clever bit that moves a metric."

Started shipping web apps in 2012, went remote in 2014, never opened an office calendar invite again. Trajectory: generalist → backend specialist → lead engineer → architect → AI engineer. Tools changed; the rule didn't: ship something real, then make it survive production.

Today: split across Laravel architecture, Shopify Plus app engineering, and agentic AI builds (Claude, MCP, RAG). Plus the open-source pieces that keep all three honest: provider abstractions, MCP servers, eval harnesses wired into Claude Code.

       04

## Operating principles.

The rules that survived 14 years. Boring on purpose. Hard to argue with under pressure.

- ### Ship → observe → improve   Never ship → hope. Observability is a hard requirement, not a stretch goal.
- ### Tests before optimism   TDD with Pest, every time. If it's not tested, assume it's broken.
- ### Boring fundamentals win   Clean Architecture, SOLID, DDD. The smallest clever bit, only when it moves a metric.
- ### AI is a feature, not a religion   Evals, cost ceilings, fallbacks. If it doesn't beat the baseline, delete it.
- ### Async by default   Stand-ups are a tax. Async docs, recorded looms, deep-work blocks instead.
- ### Protect the team   Mentor relentlessly, hire for taste, kill churn so engineers ship work they're proud of.

     05

## Stack, at a glance.

Full list lives on [/uses](https://ansezz.com/uses/). Here are the lanes.

- ### Backend   - Laravel - PHP 8.3 - Octane (FrankenPHP) - Horizon - Filament - Pest
- ### AI engineering   - Anthropic Claude - Claude Code - MCP - RAG - OpenAI - pgvector
- ### Shopify Plus   - GraphQL Admin - App Bridge - Polaris - Functions - Catalog API - Theme Extensions
- ### Data & infra   - PostgreSQL - Redis - Docker - Coolify - GitHub Actions - Cloudflare

▸ Languages

- Arabic Native
- English Professional
- French Basic

▸ Based in

- Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
- GMT+8

▸ Mode

- Remote-only
- Async-friendly
- Long engagements

### Currently obsessed with

- Anthropic MCP servers in production
- Multi-provider LLM abstractions in PHP
- pgvector + hybrid retrieval
- Agentic commerce on Shopify
- FrankenPHP worker mode tuning at scale

   Progress 60%

▸ For procurement / recruiters

Resume has every role, stack, and outcome, the version that survives ATS.

 [Download resume (PDF)](https://ansezz.com/Anass-Ez-zouaine-Resume.pdf) [Let's work together →](https://ansezz.com/contact/)

Got a project in mind?

I take on a handful of senior / lead / advisory engagements each year. First call is on me. I'll tell you honestly if it's a fit.

  [Get in touch →](https://ansezz.com/contact/) [Book a 15-min intro](https://calendar.app.google/x1eeuSb9UuMGF4pD9)

## Key links

- [/uses](https://ansezz.com/uses/)
- [Download resume (PDF)](https://ansezz.com/Anass-Ez-zouaine-Resume.pdf)
- [Let's work together →](https://ansezz.com/contact/)
- [Book a 15-min intro](https://calendar.app.google/x1eeuSb9UuMGF4pD9)