Career Profile
Saif Ahmad
Chief Digital Officer • CTO • Head of Technology • Engineering Leader
Technology executive with 25+ years across FinTech, PropTech, AI, and large-scale digital transformation. Expert in system design, cloud-native architectures, and high-volume transaction platforms. Experienced in engineering leadership, AI adoption, and modernising regulated financial systems for scale, security, and performance.
- Experience
- 25+ yrs
- Teams Led
- 150+ eng
- Platform Uptime
- 99.95%
- Location
- Riyadh • UK
Core Technologies & Architecture
Career Highlights
- Led technology strategy for digital platforms serving 250k+ lending customers and 10M monthly visitors.
- Scaled engineering organisations from 3 to 150+ via clear role definitions and team restructuring.
- Achieved 99.95% uptime via scalable system design & cloud-native architecture.
- Improved development delivery speed by 20–30% through CI/CD and agile refinements.
- Reduced infrastructure cost by 18% via cloud optimisation and resource right-sizing.
- Delivered AI-driven products including predictive analytics & GPT-based features.
- Integrated payments, identity, analytics, and customer-experience platforms to enable digital scale.
- Managed and presented Technology budget of £800k.
Key Strengths
What I repeatedly deliver across roles: dependable platforms, disciplined execution, and teams that ship at pace.
Resilient Platforms
Kept mission-critical systems at 99.95% uptime through cloud-native design, SRE rigor, and observability-first practices.
Cost Discipline
Drove 18% infrastructure savings via cloud optimisation, resource right-sizing, and pragmatic vendor choices.
AI & Product Velocity
Launched AI-driven products (PropGenius-style analytics, GPT features) that accelerated roadmap delivery and differentiated the portfolio.
Architecture & Data Integrity
Built high-availability, high-integrity platforms with strong observability, clear SLIs/SLOs, and resilience patterns baked into the stack.
Team Scaling
Grew engineering organisations from small pods to 150+ peoplewith strong ownership, velocity, and technical excellence.
Technology Governance
Instituted change control, structured reviews, and documentation standards to reduce risk while keeping delivery moving.
Startup & Scale-up Execution
- Delivered multiple v1 → v2 rebuilds in fast-paced environments.
- Thrive in ambiguity with execution-first mindset and rapid decision-making.
- Personally responsible for production incidents, debugging, fixes, and performance optimisation.
- Experienced in hiring, coaching, and making tough performance decisions.
- Built engineering cultures around clarity, accountability, and ownership.
Professional Experience
Chief Digital Officer (CDO)
Quara Finance • Riyadh • 2024 – Present
- • Leading digital transformation for a regulated lending institution serving 180K+ customers.
- • Migrated monolithic lending systems to cloud-native microservices on OCI/AWS.
- • Improved reliability to 99.95% uptime with Kubernetes & CI/CD automation.
- • Delivered 10–15% revenue growth through digital onboarding & product acceleration.
- • Achieved 18% infrastructure cost reduction through cloud optimisation.
- • Designed scalable architecture handling millions of financial transactions.
- • Ensured full PDPL & SAMA compliance with zero audit findings.
- • Managed £800K+ tech budget and a team of 70+ engineers.
Chief Technology Officer (CTO)
Quara Holding — Wasalt.com & PropGenius.ai • Riyadh • 2021 – 2024
- • Directed group-wide technology & AI strategy across PropTech platforms.
- • Built Wasalt.com to 300K+ monthly visits with improved retention.
- • Architected & launched PropGenius.ai — AI-based predictive analytics platform.
- • Built ML pipelines for valuation, GPT-based insights, & analytics dashboards.
- • Achieved 50% performance improvement & 35% scalability boost via cloud redesign.
- • Scaled engineering org from 3 → 150+ across backend, frontend, DevOps & data.
Vice President of Engineering
Ferns N Petals (fnp.com) • New Delhi • 2019 – 2021
- • Architected a scalable multi-tenant framework across 5+ global regions, supporting 1k+ concurrent users.
- • Modernised legacy e-commerce systems into microservices & microfrontends.
- • Accelerated feature delivery by 30% through DevOps automation & agile restructuring.
- • Improved operational efficiency by 20% with process & workflow redesign.
Senior Director of Technology
The Elara Group — Housing.com / Makaan.com • Gurgaon • 2015 – 2019
- • Led architecture for India’s top PropTech platforms with millions of monthly users.
- • Built Makaan.com from scratch; re-engineered Housing.com for extreme scale.
- • Scaled engineering team from 4 → 50 and delivered multiple major releases.
Deputy General Manager, Technology
People Interactive — Shaadi.com • Gurgaon • 2008 – 2015
- • Led migration of Shaadi.com from PHP monolith to Java microservices.
- • Designed & built core matching engine improving engagement & conversions.
- • Managed backend engineering team of 15.
Earlier Roles
- • Lead Technology — GlobalLogic (2006–2008)
- • Associate Consultant — Infogain (2006)
- • Senior Software Engineer — smartData (2005–2006)
- • Software Engineer — Sahara India (2000–2005)
Connect & Next Steps
Open to digital transformation leadership roles, advisory opportunities, and modern engineering organisation building.