Ahmed Rizawan is a production engineer and DevOps consultant based in Bangkok. He keeps live software reliable and secure for product teams in Europe and the US: risky deploys, recurring outages, security vulnerabilities, slow APIs and sites, and AI features that don't hold up in production.
Fintech compliance screening: 4 hours to 45 seconds, 1.7M+ records, about $0.03 a check.
I've built and run production systems since 2011, across food delivery, real estate, media, e-commerce and fintech. My afternoon overlaps the European morning; for US teams I work while you're offline. Not to be confused with the British actor Riz Ahmed; the name is spelled R-i-z-a-w-a-n.
- years building software
- 15+
- years in DevOps and infrastructure
- 12+
Selected work
- Compliance screening for a fintech client with AI agents and RAG: cut from 4 hours to 45 seconds, checking 1.7M+ sanctions records at about $0.03 a check.
- Operate Taptober, a multi-tenant Oktoberfest league platform (FastAPI, Expo, Hetzner): shipped the Oslo Oktoberfest 2026 launch with OTA releases and smoke-gated deploys.
- Built and run Nabro, a neighbourhood quiz platform live on the App Store (Next.js, Supabase, Vercel, Expo).
- Site reliability at Qwil: Terraform, Google Kubernetes Engine, GitLab CI, security patching and on-call.
- Open source: vidlizer, point it at a video, image or PDF and get structured JSON.
- Built DistillPrompt, a free native macOS app: a global hotkey rewrites rough prompts into production-quality ones, on-device with Apple Foundation Models or with your own API key.
- Co-founder and technical lead at MyMuayThai, a platform for finding and booking Muay Thai gyms and trainers in Thailand.
- Integration services and infrastructure as code at Moo Gruppen.
What clients say
“Riz understood the compliance constraints from day one. In regulated fintech, that kind of reliability is rare in an external partner.”
“Page loads went from seconds to milliseconds. Riz delivered faster than our timeline and the quality exceeded what we expected.”
“He integrated AI-driven AML screening into our compliance pipeline across 1.7 million sanctions records. It actually works in production, not just a demo.”
Problems I solve
Senior advisory or contract work.
Deploys are slow, manual or risky
CI/CD pipelines and infrastructure as code (Terraform, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI), so a release is routine and easy to roll back.
Outages and incidents keep recurring
Root causes found and fixed, then monitoring, alerting and runbooks so the next one is caught early. I ran on-call as site reliability engineer at Qwil.
Security vulnerabilities keep piling up
Vulnerabilities fixed in code, dependencies, servers and containers, with patching on a schedule and a rollback path.
Your API or site is slow
The slow path found first, then fixed: database queries and indexes, caching, payload size and Core Web Vitals, measured before and after.
You inherited code nobody trusts
A security code review covering data integrity and failure paths, then fixes for the riskiest parts first, however the code was built.
AI features and automations fail in production
LLMs, RAG, AI agents and workflow automations (OpenAI, Claude) integrated into the live system, with retries, logging, and cost and latency tracked.
Experience
Rebate Networks / OScom2011–2012
Head of IT
HungryNaki2013–2018
Sr. DevOps & Product Designer
Patch Homes2016–2020
Sr. Full Stack Developer
Kyra & Vir2018–2019
Fullstack Developer, part-time
Qwil2019–2020
Site Reliability Engineer
Nomadory2020
Full Stack Engineer, part-time
Moo Gruppen2020–2025
Full Stack Engineer & DevOps
Thea Tech Solutions2023–present
Founder & Principal Engineer
MyMuayThai2025–present
Co-founder & technical lead
Taptober & Nabro2026–present
Contract engineer, Bygg Bevaring AS and Nabro AS
Industries: food delivery, real estate, media, e-commerce, fintech
Skills
Backend and data13+ years
PHP, Laravel, Node.js, TypeScript, Python, Bash, PostgreSQL, MySQL, WordPress, WooCommerce
Infrastructure12+ years
Terraform, Ansible, Helm, Docker, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, AWS, Google Cloud, Cloudflare, Prometheus, Grafana, observability, SLOs and SLAs, postmortems
AI and automation3+ years
OpenAI and Claude APIs, RAG, AI agents, workflow automation
Apps8+ years
Hybrid apps, Android, iOS
GitHub activity
5,931 contributions from Oct 2025 to Oct 2026 on github.com/arizawan
Questions
Who is Ahmed Rizawan?
Ahmed Rizawan is a production engineer and DevOps consultant based in Bangkok. He keeps live software reliable and secure for product teams in Europe and the US: risky deploys, recurring outages, security vulnerabilities, slow APIs and sites, and AI features that don't hold up in production.
What is a production engineer?
A production engineer keeps live software reliable: deploys, monitoring, incidents, security patching and performance. It covers the same ground as site reliability engineering (SRE) and DevOps, and the title comes from large internet companies such as Meta.
What problems does he solve?
Risky deploys, recurring outages and security vulnerabilities are his main areas. He also fixes slow APIs and sites, reviews inherited code for security and failure paths, and gets AI features and automations working reliably in production.
What technologies does he work with?
Terraform, Docker, GitHub Actions and GitLab CI on AWS, Google Cloud and Cloudflare; PHP, Node.js and Python backends; LLM APIs, RAG and AI agents; hybrid, Android and iOS apps.
What does a DevOps consultant do for a product team?
Sets up reliable CI/CD and infrastructure as code, reduces outages and patches security vulnerabilities in the live system, usually as a short senior contract.
Is Ahmed Rizawan the actor Riz Ahmed?
No. Ahmed Rizawan (spelled R-i-z-a-w-a-n) is a software engineer in Bangkok. Riz Ahmed is a British actor.
Can I hire him as a DevOps or SRE contractor?
Yes. He takes senior advisory and contract work directly. Email with your stack and what's breaking.
Where and in which time zone does he work?
Bangkok, Thailand (UTC+7). His afternoon overlaps the European morning; for US teams he works while they are offline.
Contact
Email me about senior advisory or contract work. Include your stack and what's breaking.