The full story
I'm Ehsan Gazar, a Staff Software Engineer in London who writes, mentors, and builds products. Fifteen-plus years shipping software across fintech, retail, wagering, and startups, making mistakes and learning from both.
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gazar.dev is a brand and portfolio operated by QUEEK LIMITED.
From Tehran to London
No connections, no pedigree, just a borrowed laptop and a habit of figuring things out.
Wrote my first line of code in Tehran. No CS degree yet, just curiosity and a borrowed laptop.
Moved to Australia and spent the next years shipping software people actually depended on, across retail, wagering, and automotive.
Staff Software Engineer in London, building payment products at Tipalti. Still writing, mentoring, and learning every day.
What I care about
Three things I keep coming back to.
Build
Systems where clarity, accessibility, and developer experience come first.
Mentor
Engineers, because the best way to learn something is to teach it.
Write
About the hard parts, because that's where the real lessons are.
What I work with
Tools are means, not ends. These are the ones I reach for most.
Backend
Frontend
Cloud & Infra
AI
Professional experience
The roles that taught me the most, each one pushed me into problems I hadn't solved before.
Staff Software Engineer
Tipalti • London, UK
- Ship features across Procurement and Tipalti's core payment products, where thousands of global customers depend on automation, usability, and reliability every day.
- Designed a shared Vue and React design system that cut feature delivery from three months to under two weeks.
- Led the payee-vendor sync platform and brought sync latency down to under three seconds.
- Orchestrated the migration of 200+ enterprise customers off the legacy stack.
- Optimized core APIs, pulling response times from around ten seconds to under two.
- Organized company-wide "AI Weeks" and mentored engineers on Claude Code and AI adoption. Innovation needs structure, not just enthusiasm.
- Drive engineering quality through code reviews, architecture docs, and decision records. Good documentation is not overhead -- it's how distributed teams stay aligned.
Lead Software Engineer
Mecca Brands • Melbourne, Australia
- Led a team of 6 engineers across a microfrontend and microservices architecture; the apps I owned served around 20% of business traffic. Pushed clean code through reviews, pairing, and knowledge sharing.
- Owned the full release pipeline -- from code through QA, performance testing, monitoring, and production e2e tests. Wrote the technical specs and broke down tickets so the team could move independently.
- Cut 5 seconds off the service booking journey and pushed NPS up by 5 points. Got the homepage loading under 2 seconds using caching, Lambda routing, SSR, and rendering optimizations.
- Stayed 70% hands-on. Deep work in frontend, SSR, microfrontend dependency management, CI/CD, AWS, and production debugging with Datadog and CloudWatch.
Lead Software Engineer
IE Digital • Melbourne, Australia
- Led engineering for Toyota Australia, Lexus Australia, and AGL. Built digital experiences on Sitecore and React that shipped to millions of users, cutting Toyota Australia's LCP by around 30% through code-splitting.
- Designed and built a design system and a tablet application for Australia Post. Both got recognized at the Toyota and Australia Post headquarters -- real client impact.
- Worked with a team of 5 developers and graduates. Small teams move fast, but only if everyone is aligned. I invested heavily in mentoring and pair programming.
- Ran hackathons for Toyota and IE engineers. Hackathons done right are not about the output -- they're about giving people permission to experiment.
- Stayed 70% hands-on. Built design systems, Storybook libraries, and the Australia Post tablet app. Also shipped Card.gift as a side project.
Senior Software Engineer
Sportsbet • Melbourne, Australia
Senior Full Stack Engineer
CHE Proximity • Melbourne, Australia
Senior Front-end Engineer
CHE Proximity • Melbourne, Australia
Lead JavaScript Developer
Round Table Apps • Sydney, Australia
Lead Full-Stack JavaScript Developer
PersianGig Company • Tehran, Iran
Senior Backend Developer
Netbarg • Tehran, Iran
Co-Founder at Atys Consultancy Agency
Atys Co. • Tehran, Iran
Education
BSc in Computer Science • K.N.Toosi University of Technology (2008 – 2013)
Talks & presentations
I speak at conferences and meetups about the things I've learned the hard way.