01— INTROCairo, Egypt

Mohamed Medhat Ali

Senior Backend Engineer — Go, Java, System Design, Payments

Ask me anything — grounded in real experience

View projectsGet in touch
02— ABOUT

Backend-focused software engineer with 6+ years building scalable systems, the last two in payments. Owned the architecture and delivery of Network Tokens at Payrails, lifting merchants' recurring-payment authorization rates by an average of 22% and turning it into one of the product's main differentiators. Ships Go microservices handling cardholder data under PCI DSS, interviews and mentors engineers, and builds internal tooling that speeds up the team.

03— EDUCATION

BSc, Computer Science and Engineering

German University in Cairo · 2019

04— EXPERIENCE5 roles

  1. Senior Backend Developer — Payrails

    2025-12 — Present

    Go — Vault Team

    • Feature architecture: Own technical design for new features — author RFCs and technical design documents, drive them through review with adjacent teams, and break the work down for implementation.
    • Secure data handling: Build and operate services processing sensitive payment data in a strictly regulated PCI DSS-compliant environment.
    • Hiring & enablement: Interview backend candidates in coding and system-design rounds; run onboarding sessions for new hires on payment workflows, coding standards, and company culture.
    • Network Tokens: Own the technical design and evolution of the Network Tokens solution from the Vault team, improving payment security and authorization rates.

  2. Backend Developer — Payrails

    2024-03 — 2025-11

    Go — Connector Team

    • Developer tooling: Built an internal AI agent skill (Claude) encoding the team's provider-integration standards and field mappings, cutting average integration time from 2 weeks to 4 days (~60% faster).
    • Architecture & cross-team delivery: Designed the Network Tokens solution and drove delivery end to end across multiple teams, from product and development through delivery and monitoring. Lifted merchants' recurring-payment authorization rates by 22% on average, making it one of Payrails' main commercial differentiators.
    • Provider integrations: Developed and improved 40+ payment providers across payments, fraud, 3DS, and network tokens, expanding the platform's global processing coverage.
    • Customer onboarding: Supported customer onboarding through solution calls, integration guides, and documentation.

  3. Backend Developer – Tech Lead — Instabug

    2022-01 — 2024-03

    Ruby on Rails

    • Tech lead: Led a squad of 3 backend developers, owning delivery, planning, code quality, and mentoring, on the Enterprise Customization team.
    • Designed and shipped system-wide features in a platform processing over a million user sessions per day.
    • Delivered enterprise customizations that were decisive in locking deals and up-selling existing customers.
    • Facilitated pre-planning and planning for the team's features, coaching engineers on TDD and reviewing their PRs.
    • Built multiple internal tools adopted by engineering and non engineering teams.

  4. Full Stack Developer — Pixelogic Media

    2020-12 — 2021-12

    Java (Spring Boot) — React

    • Built features in a distributed-systems environment on the Operations Management (OM) team, using React and Java (Spring Boot).
    • Led the Ant Design major version migration across the frontend.
    • Optimized multiple database queries and API endpoints as part of a company-wide latency improvement initiative.

  5. Backend Developer — EsriNEA

    2019-10 — 2020-11

    Java (Spring Boot)

    • Built core services for an emergency-response system sold to multiple GCC governments (Qatar, Bahrain), locating callers via nearby cell towers and computing multiple dispatch routes to the emergency.
    • Designed an audit-log system tracking all user actions across API calls and dashboards, including data-change attribution.
    • Diagnosed and fixed a critical memory leak causing JVM crashes, using profiling tools to trace it to its root cause.
05— SELECTED WORK2 entries
01 — CLAUDE-INTEGRATION-AGENT2025 · Payrails — Connector Team

Claude Integration-Standards Agent

Every new payment-provider integration on Payrails' Connector team followed the same underlying conventions — how fields map onto the platform's data model, which edge cases to handle, how to structure the code — but that knowledge lived in people's heads and in past pull requests, so each new integration re-derived it from scratch. Medhat encoded those standards and field-mapping conventions into a Claude agent skill, giving engineers a tool that applies the team's established patterns directly instead of everyone re-deriving them per provider. The result was a drop in average integration time from 2 weeks to 4 days — roughly 60% faster — freeing the team to take on more provider integrations across multiple countries.

toolingai-agentsclaude
SIDE A — 03 - NETWORK-TOKENS2025
Network TokensPAYMENTS
02 — NETWORK-TOKENS2025 · Payrails — Connector & Vault Teams

Network Tokens

Card issuers decline recurring payments more often when the stored card number is outdated — expired, reissued, or replaced after a fraud flag — even though the cardholder's account is still valid. Network tokenization solves this at the network level: a card network issues a token that stands in for the real card number and updates automatically as the underlying card changes, so a merchant's stored credential stays live without asking the customer to re-enter their card. Medhat designed Payrails' Network Tokens solution and drove its delivery end to end, coordinating the Connector team (provider integrations) and the Vault team (secure card-data storage under PCI DSS) around a shared technical design. After moving to the Vault team, he took over its continued technical design and evolution. The result — a 22% average lift in recurring-payment authorization rates for merchants — made it one of Payrails' main commercial differentiators.

paymentsarchitecturesystem-design
06— SKILLS3 groups

Languages & Frameworks

GORUBY ON RAILSJAVA (SPRING BOOT)TYPESCRIPTNODE.JSREACTPYTHON (FLASK)

Data & Infrastructure

POSTGRESQLMYSQLMONGODBELASTICSEARCHSOLRREDISKUBERNETESDOCKER

Domain & Tooling

SYSTEM DESIGNPAYMENTSPCI DSSNETWORK TOKENIZATIONDISTRIBUTED SYSTEMSCLAUDE CODE / AI AGENTS
07— CONTACTCairo, Egypt

Open to backend, payments, and systems-design conversations — reach out directly.

Email meDownload resumeLinkedInGitHub