Awais Arshad
Senior Software Engineer & Technical Lead
I grew up in Pakistan playing Need for Speed and GTA, obsessed with how it all worked. That curiosity pointed me toward software engineering, and I've been building things ever since.
The career took me from Lahore to Abu Dhabi, then Dubai, and eventually to the Netherlands. Dubai was great, but I could feel myself hitting a ceiling. The Netherlands felt like the right move: a genuine opportunity to grow, and a country that (with its green landscapes and closeness to nature) felt surprisingly like home. I bike everywhere now. It's the only way to do it here.
Ten years in, I mostly work in .NET and Azure, deep in the integration layers and distributed systems where reliability actually matters. What I care about most is making delivery feel less painful: better observability, cleaner architecture, and staying close enough to the product that technical choices age well.
Right now at Independer in Hilversum, leading service modernisation and reliability engineering for the insurance platform.
Areas of focus
Enterprise Integration
Messaging platforms, ESB, EIP, and the third-party connectors that have to work at scale. This is the domain I've spent the most time in, designing integration layers that survive real operational conditions.
Cloud & Distributed Systems
Production experience across Azure and AWS: service buses, event-driven architecture, distributed caching, and microservices architectures that stay up under real load.
Delivery & Observability
Monitoring and CI/CD pipelines aren't afterthoughts. I push for observability from day one and have led rollouts that measurably cut lead times and improved incident response.
Technical Leadership
Design reviews, mentoring engineers, translating between business stakeholders and engineering teams. The goal is always better collective decisions, not just faster individual ones.
Experience
- 2025 – nowIndepender · Hilversum, NL
Senior Engineer
Service modernisation and reliability engineering for the insurance domain. .NET 8 migration, enterprise integrations with KVK and KIWA, and observability uplift. - 2024Coolblue · Rotterdam, NL
Senior Engineer
High-performance logistics backends, including a flexible time-slot pricing platform and a 90% API latency reduction through caching and query optimisation. - 2020 – 2023TransCore · Dubai, UAE
Senior Engineer
Distributed systems serving millions of daily users: OCR integrations, enterprise messaging, and centralised observability across a distributed team. - 2018 – 2020ME Services · Abu Dhabi, UAE
Software Engineer
Led Azure DevOps adoption and built a React Native driver app, cutting team lead time by 20% and lifting productivity by 35%.
How I think about the work
Make the next engineer's job easier, not harder.
Observability is part of the feature, not an afterthought.
Product context belongs inside technical decisions.
The best architecture is one the whole team can reason about.
Get in touch