Mohammad Zaki Jariwala
AI Product Manager · Technical Lead Infrastructure + AI — shipping products in the gaps Engineer who builds products and wants to do it full-time
4 products shipped 0-to-1 · 3 years enterprise engineering · AWS + GenAI certified whatever I'm building this month I find it hard to stop building things
Building a content automation pipeline that turns YouTube transcripts into publication-ready articles across 12 niches. Studying for GCP Professional Cloud Architect. Reading about product discovery frameworks and what makes an AI product actually useful once the novelty wears off.
About
Systems Engineer at TCS, deployed at State Bank of India, keeping mission-critical banking infrastructure running at 99.999% uptime for 30,000+ users. The day job built the technical credibility: three years leading a team of five, managing 150+ servers, cutting RTO by 50%. The nights built the product experience: an offline supplication app with 22,000 records and sub-10ms search, a running app with 50+ alpha users, a marine equipment digital ecosystem with AI-powered B2B outreach, and a content automation pipeline. I know what engineers are actually talking about — and I know what it takes to ship something real.
I run infrastructure for a Tier-1 Indian bank by day and build AI automation pipelines, PWAs, and embedded devices by night. My stack spans Linux/RHEL server fleets, Python ETL and LLM orchestration, Flutter mobile, Astro JAMstack, and ESP32 firmware — usually on free-tier infrastructure and always with a bias toward shipping over theorising. Currently deep into GenAI workflow design and thinking hard about what product management looks like when the core technology is still moving.
I'm an engineer based in Navi Mumbai who finds it hard to stop building things. My day job is keeping banking systems alive for tens of thousands of people. That part I'm good at. But it's not the part that keeps me up.
Outside that, I've built an offline Islamic supplication app used by a small community of Muslims worldwide, a running app with ghost routes and crowd radar, a pocket e-ink reader from scratch, and a marketing automation system for my family's marine parts business. None of these were assigned to me. I built them because the alternatives were bad and I thought I could do better.
I also spent a few months coaching engineers on how to talk about their work — which turned out to be more technical than it sounds. Understanding what makes a story land is not that different from understanding what makes a product land.
Right now I'm building a content automation pipeline and thinking seriously about moving into product management. Not because it sounds good on a resume, but because the part of every project I've enjoyed most is always the same: deciding what to build and why.
Experience
Tata Consultancy Services
Deployed at State Bank of India (SBI GITC)
Systems Engineer, IDM & Infrastructure
For my day job I keep a major bank's systems running for tens of thousands of people — the kind of work where success means nobody ever notices it.
- Led an operations team delivering 99.999% availability for Tier-1 banking applications across 30,000+ branch users — setting team priorities, mentoring 5 engineers, and managing escalations end-to-end.
- Collaborated across infrastructure, application, database, and security teams to align delivery priorities and maintain regulatory compliance under strict banking constraints.
- Drove infrastructure modernisation, evaluated build-vs-buy tradeoffs, secured stakeholder alignment, and led adoption of on-premise container-based workflows within compliance boundaries — translating engineering constraints into a prioritised delivery roadmap for leadership.
- Architected and executed Disaster Recovery runbooks in cross-functional coordination with application and database teams, reducing Recovery Time Objective (RTO) by 50%.
- Translate complex incident data and technical risk into clear communications for business stakeholders and senior leadership.
- Operated IBM Security Identity Manager (ISIM) on RHEL 8 — managing user provisioning, access governance, and policy enforcement across 150+ application servers in an on-premise Tier-1 banking datacenter maintaining 99.999% platform SLA via active-passive HA clustering and automated health monitoring.
- Led on-premise containerisation of legacy IDM workflows: evaluated Podman vs Docker within RBI/SEBI compliance boundaries, defined container topology and orchestration approach, secured sign-off from security and compliance stakeholders.
- Authored cross-team DR runbooks covering IDM primary/replica switchover, application server restart sequences, and database consistency validation — reducing RTO from ~4 hours to under 2 hours (50% reduction) through structured tabletop drills and live execution.
- Automated recurring ops tasks (patch compliance checks, certificate rotation tracking, capacity utilisation reports) in Python and Bash — eliminating ~8 hours/week of manual overhead across the team.
- The day job means keeping banking infrastructure alive for tens of thousands of people. Success is invisible — if nobody notices, everything went right.
Independent Coaching Practice
Technical interview readiness for engineering and management candidates
Founder & Technical Communication Coach
For a while I ran a small coaching practice helping engineers talk about their work in a way that actually lands with people who aren't engineers.
- Founded and scaled a coaching practice from zero — handling client acquisition, curriculum design, and end-to-end delivery for 50+ engineering and management professionals.
- Designed a structured curriculum covering STAR-method framing, stakeholder communication, and senior-level interview strategy — iterating based on client outcomes and session feedback.
- Developed repeatable frameworks for technical storytelling, enabling clients to translate complex engineering work into language accessible to non-technical decision-makers.
- Turned out that teaching engineers to explain themselves clearly is a harder problem than it looks — and more satisfying to solve than I expected.
Projects
Zamaan Marine Digital Ecosystem
Full digital ecosystem for a family marine parts business — storefront, cold email automation, and analytics at zero hosting cost.
- Identified the digital gap through direct conversations with 200+ B2B prospects — validating channels, value proposition, and pricing signals before writing a line of code.
- Defined and prioritised a zero-budget digital stack: JAMstack storefront for discoverability, eBay API automation for listings (~60% faster time-to-market), and an AI-powered cold-email funnel for B2B acquisition.
- Instrumented product analytics via PostHog, tracking the full funnel from storefront visit to eBay conversion — using data to reprioritise listing categories and outreach targeting.
- Shipped an AI cold-email agent achieving 90%+ inbox delivery across campaign cycles.
- Cold-email agent: Claude API prompt templates per industry vertical → Python orchestrator → Brevo SMTP with sender rotation and bounce handling → delivery rate tracking. 90%+ inbox rate across campaign cycles.
- eBay Browse API integration: Python ingestion pipeline parses product data, maps to eBay taxonomy, and pushes listings in batch — ~60% reduction in per-SKU listing time vs. manual entry.
- PostHog JS SDK on a fully static Astro/Cloudflare Pages frontend: custom event schema tracking browse → click → eBay redirect funnel, session replay configured to exclude contact fields.
- Zero-persistent-backend architecture: Astro SSG → Cloudflare Pages CDN, GitHub Actions CI, all serverless — total recurring cost: $0.
- My family's business had no real digital presence. I built the whole thing — website, automated email campaigns, product listings — in spare time, at zero cost.
My family started a business selling refurbished marine and industrial parts, mostly through eBay. The digital side was an afterthought. I stepped in to build it properly, which meant treating a small family operation with the same engineering rigour I'd apply at work. The constraint of zero budget made it more interesting, not less.
Content Automation Pipeline
End-to-end pipeline that turns YouTube transcripts into publication-ready Medium articles across 12 niches — 85% reduction in time-to-draft.
- Identified that content creators spend most research-to-draft time on mechanical, repeatable work — designed and shipped a pipeline automating transcript ingestion, LLM transformation, and publishing.
- Defined and built an LLM governance layer ('Failure First' framework) to solve a specific output-quality problem — eliminating safe, generic AI prose across 12 distinct content niches.
- Reduced time-to-draft by 85%; built a cross-platform desktop GUI (Tauri/React 19) enabling non-technical users to operate the pipeline without CLI access.
- Pipeline: yt-dlp transcript ingestion → Gemini 1.5 Pro transformation → JSON state machine for progress tracking and resumable runs → GitPython sync to GitHub-backed article store.
- 'Failure First' framework: heuristic validators detect safe/generic LLM output patterns (hedging language, filler phrases, passive-voice saturation) and trigger re-generation with escalating specificity constraints until prose passes quality gates.
- Desktop GUI: Tauri (Rust shell) + React 19 frontend — IPC bridge spawns the Python pipeline subprocess and streams real-time progress back to the UI. Cross-platform: macOS, Windows, Linux.
- I was writing articles and realised most of the process was the same mechanical steps every time. So I automated those steps — which meant the parts that needed actual judgment got more of my attention.
I was writing AWS certification articles for Medium and realised the research-to-draft process was almost entirely mechanical. I built a pipeline to handle the mechanical part so the human part — judgment, voice, editing — could actually matter. The Failure First framework came from noticing that AI-generated content fails the same way every time: it starts safe and stays safe. I built rules specifically to break that pattern.
Path of Supplication
Offline-first PWA with a 22,000-record indexed SQLite database, sub-10ms full-text search, and 80MB multilingual payload — zero hosting cost, validated with 40+ beta testers.
- Identified a gap in available supplication apps — existing options were ad-heavy, required constant connectivity, or lacked multilingual support — and validated the problem before building.
- Structured a publicly available liturgical database of 22,000+ records into an optimised, indexed SQLite schema achieving sub-10ms local query times.
- Shipped as an offline-first PWA with service worker caching, delivering 80MB of multilingual content (Arabic, Urdu, English) at zero hosting cost.
- Ran a structured beta with 40+ testers across iOS Safari, Android Chrome, and desktop — triaging feedback and shipping iterative improvements based on user-reported priorities.
- SQLite schema: 22,000+ records normalised across language, category, sequence, and metadata tables — composite indexes on (category_id, sequence) and FTS5 virtual table for full-text Arabic/Urdu/English search. Sub-10ms queries on mobile WebAssembly runtime.
- Service worker strategy: static app shell pre-cached at install; content database lazy-loaded on first access and persisted in Cache API indefinitely — 80MB offline payload, zero recurring cost.
- Python ETL pipeline: XLSX source normalisation → schema validation against known data inconsistencies → FTS5 virtual table generation → SQLite binary packaged as a WASM-compatible asset.
- The apps that existed for Islamic supplications were slow, cluttered, or needed an internet connection. I built one that works offline, in three languages, on any device, for free.
The existing apps for Islamic supplications were clunky, ad-heavy, or required a constant internet connection. For something as personal as duas and ziyarat, that friction felt wrong. I wanted something that worked offline, in your language, on any device, with no ads and no backend. A big part of the work was understanding the data well enough to build proper search.
run.to — Activity Platform
A full-featured Flutter running app with GPS tracking, ghost routes, and crowd radar — built across 6 segments using Clean Architecture.
- Built a consumer running app (GPS tracking, ghost routes, crowd radar) end-to-end across 6 feature segments — owning architecture, backend, and UX decisions.
- Grew to 50+ local alpha users in early testing, validating core flows and GPS accuracy before deliberately taking the product private to polish based on feedback.
- Clean Architecture with Riverpod as the state machine layer — ~8k LOC across feature modules (auth, GPS, routes, social, settings) with strict separation between data, domain, and presentation layers.
- PostGIS on Supabase: sub-100ms geospatial queries for nearby-runner detection using ST_DWithin on indexed geography columns; ghost route playback via LineString geometries interpolated to real-time pace in Flutter isolates.
- Local SQLite cache for offline route history and GPS track storage — synced to Supabase on reconnect via a custom conflict-resolution strategy.
- I wanted a running app that did what I wanted, so I built one. It took longer than expected, and now I actually know what it takes to ship a real mobile product.
I wanted to understand what it actually takes to build a consumer mobile product end to end — not a tutorial project, but something with real architecture decisions, a real backend, and real UX tradeoffs. Running was the use case because I run, and the features I wanted didn't exist in a form I liked. Clean Architecture and Riverpod were deliberate choices to stress-test my ability to structure a non-trivial codebase.
ESP-Pocket Reader
A pocket e-ink reading device built on ESP32-S3 — custom firmware, SQLite content storage, and a Python EPUB ingestion pipeline.
- Designed and built a working hardware product end-to-end — from EPUB ingestion pipeline to custom embedded firmware with stable e-ink display rendering.
- Architected a custom pocket-sized e-ink reading device using an ESP32-S3 microcontroller and a 3.7-inch E-Paper display, achieving a functional firmware prototype with stable display rendering.
- Developed embedded C++ firmware (ESP-IDF/PlatformIO) integrating SD card storage and SQLite for robust content management — storing and paginating 50+ EPUB-converted documents in testing.
- Engineered a Python EPUB-to-SQLite conversion pipeline, reducing per-book ingestion time to under 30 seconds for titles up to 500 pages.
- Reading on a phone is miserable. I built my own pocket e-ink reader from scratch — designing every layer yourself, from the EPUB parser to the display driver, turns out to be more satisfying than buying one.
Reading on a phone destroys your eyes and your battery life. E-readers exist but they're expensive, locked down, and designed around ecosystems I don't want to be in. I wanted a device that did exactly one thing — display text clearly — and cost almost nothing to run. Building the firmware myself meant understanding every layer of the stack, from EPUB parsing down to the display driver.
Personal Remote Dev Server
A persistent cloud Linux dev environment on Oracle Free Tier — full-stack workflows from any device, zero cost, 99%+ uptime over 18 months.
- Set up and maintained a persistent cloud development environment with 99%+ uptime over 18 months — enabling full-stack development workflows from any device at zero recurring cost.
- Designed and configured a fully persistent remote Linux development environment on Oracle Cloud Free Tier — production-equivalent compute at zero recurring cost.
- Optimised for smartphone and laptop access via Zellij terminal multiplexing and Termius SSH, enabling full-stack development workflows from any device.
- Maintained 99%+ uptime over 18+ months of continuous use, with automated session persistence eliminating context loss between work sessions.
- I got tired of long-running builds dying when my laptop went to sleep. I set up a server in the cloud that's always on — which means I can write code from my phone when I'm away from a desk.
My personal projects involve a lot of long-running processes — builds, pipelines, SSH tunnels — that don't play well with a laptop that goes to sleep. I also wanted to be able to develop from my phone when away from a desk. Oracle Cloud's free tier is genuinely powerful if you configure it right, and Zellij with persistent sessions solves the context-loss problem that makes remote development frustrating.
Skills
Certifications
AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C03)
Amazon Web Services
Authored a 3-part Medium article series on SAA-C03 aimed at non-technical candidates.
Google GenAI Leader
Google Cloud
Validates applied GenAI product thinking and responsible AI leadership — covering model evaluation, prompt design, and AI product strategy across the Google ecosystem.
Professional Cloud Architect
Google Cloud
Actively studying — expected completion mid-2026.
Contact
Let's talk product Let's build something Say hello
Open to AI PM, product, and innovation roles. Technical background with real 0-to-1 product experience. Based in Mumbai, open to relocation. Always interested in interesting problems. Best reached over email. Say hello — I reply.
Jariwalazaki@gmail.com