Location: Abu Dhabi, UAE (UTC+4, strong US morning overlap)
Remote: Yes (100%)
Willing to relocate: No
Technologies: TypeScript, React, Next.js, React Native, Expo, Astro, Supabase, Python, self-managed Linux
Résumé/CV: https://k4r.im
Email: contact@k4r.im
Founders making their first engineering hire are picking between two bad doors. Either someone cheap who leaves a mess, or someone great you can never afford to lose. I'm the third door.
I work like a technical co-founder, and I'm built to be replaced. I ship your production v1, and when the product proves out, I help you stand up your in-house engineering team that takes over from me.
Who this is for: Funded founders with no engineering leadership yet who need real software shipped before the next raise.
What I've shipped as the sole or founding engineer:
1. An edtech platform bootstrapped to 240,000+ users on $0 marketing, fully organic. Custom constraint-satisfaction engine for procedural puzzles, with a separate cryptographic anti-cheat layer. Peaked at 11,000 users in one day on a single VPS.
2. A live emergency-response pilot. Client-side indoor navigation with sub-100ms routing around active fire zones, a master-worker computer-vision pipeline over RTSP streams, and a custom Android background service for persistent GPS. Won a 20,000 AED grant and a signed pilot contract.
3. A four-system financial intelligence suite at near 100% uptime. Forecasting on Prophet, a news aggregator with cryptographic deduplication, and a Telegram trading terminal for Binance and Bybit.
4. Internal tooling for an international marketing agency. First tool live on day five. One of them translated content across 39 languages in a single pass, replacing hours of manual editing.
I use AI tooling like autocomplete. It makes me faster, but it doesn't make the decisions, and nothing ships that I haven't read.
Async, remote, long-term monthly engagements. Cash, no equity. UAE Golden Visa, self-sponsored.
I work like a technical co-founder, and I'm built to be replaced. I ship your production v1, and when the product proves out, I help you stand up your in-house engineering team that takes over from me.
Who this is for: Funded founders with no engineering leadership yet who need real software shipped before the next raise.
What I've shipped as the sole or founding engineer:
1. An edtech platform bootstrapped to 240,000+ users on $0 marketing, fully organic. Custom constraint-satisfaction engine for procedural puzzles, with a separate cryptographic anti-cheat layer. Peaked at 11,000 users in one day on a single VPS.
2. A live emergency-response pilot. Client-side indoor navigation with sub-100ms routing around active fire zones, a master-worker computer-vision pipeline over RTSP streams, and a custom Android background service for persistent GPS. Won a 20,000 AED grant and a signed pilot contract.
3. A four-system financial intelligence suite at near 100% uptime. Forecasting on Prophet, a news aggregator with cryptographic deduplication, and a Telegram trading terminal for Binance and Bybit.
4. Internal tooling for an international marketing agency. First tool live on day five. One of them translated content across 39 languages in a single pass, replacing hours of manual editing.
I use AI tooling like autocomplete. It makes me faster, but it doesn't make the decisions, and nothing ships that I haven't read.
Async, remote, long-term monthly engagements. Cash, no equity. UAE Golden Visa, self-sponsored.