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ansezz.

▸ About

Backend brain. AI heart. 12 years of shipping.

I'm Anass — senior lead backend engineer, software architect, and AI engineer. Remote-only since 2014. I help founders, agencies, and product teams ship Laravel SaaS, Shopify Plus apps, and AI features that survive real users.

Open for senior / lead / advisory engagements

▸ Heads up

Remote-first since 2014. GMT+1, but I adapt to your zone.

01

By the numbers.

Receipts before opinions. The kind of numbers that hold up under procurement review.

  • 12+

    Years shipping

  • 60+

    Production builds

  • 3

    Continents served

  • 10+

    Shopify apps (public + private)

  • 100%

    Remote since 2014

  • 1

    Time zone (GMT+1)

02

How I actually work.

Three phases. No agile theater, no surprise scope creep. Boring, predictable, ships.

  1. Discover

    1-week deep dive. Codebase audit, architecture review, risk + cost report, 12-week remediation plan. Honest scope before any code.

  2. Build

    TDD with Pest. Architecture-first. Production-ready from sprint one. Daily deploys, observability, incident-ready. No demoware.

  3. Hand off

    Docs, runbooks, eval harnesses, pair sessions with your team. Your engineers ship the next feature without me — that's the win.

03

From PHP scripts to AI agents.

Twelve years building products for teams that needed them to work. Not in a demo, not in a slide deck — on day three, when the cron job dies and the customer is angry. That taught me the rule I still ship by: observable infra costs less than incident response, and async architecture beats timezone friction every time.

"Boring fundamentals, opinionated defaults, the smallest clever bit that moves a metric."

Started shipping web apps in 2012, went remote in 2014, never opened an office calendar invite again. Trajectory: generalist → backend specialist → lead engineer → architect → AI engineer. Tools changed; the rule didn't — ship something real, then make it survive production.

Today: split across Laravel architecture, Shopify Plus app engineering, and agentic AI builds (Claude, MCP, RAG). Plus the open-source pieces that keep all three honest — provider abstractions, MCP servers, eval harnesses wired into Claude Code.

04

Operating principles.

The rules that survived twelve years. Boring on purpose. Hard to argue with under pressure.

  • Ship → observe → improve

    Never ship → hope. Observability is a hard requirement, not a stretch goal.

  • Tests before optimism

    TDD with Pest, every time. If it's not tested, assume it's broken.

  • Boring fundamentals win

    Clean Architecture, SOLID, DDD. The smallest clever bit, only when it moves a metric.

  • AI is a feature, not a religion

    Evals, cost ceilings, fallbacks. If it doesn't beat the baseline, delete it.

  • Async by default

    Stand-ups are a tax. Async docs, recorded looms, deep-work blocks instead.

  • Protect the team

    Mentor relentlessly, hire for taste, kill churn so engineers ship work they're proud of.

05

Stack, at a glance.

Full list lives on /uses — here are the lanes.

  • Backend

    • Laravel
    • PHP 8.3
    • Octane (FrankenPHP)
    • Horizon
    • Filament
    • Pest

  • AI engineering

    • Anthropic Claude
    • Claude Code
    • MCP
    • RAG
    • OpenAI
    • pgvector

  • Shopify Plus

    • GraphQL Admin
    • App Bridge
    • Polaris
    • Functions
    • Catalog API
    • Theme Extensions

  • Data & infra

    • PostgreSQL
    • Redis
    • Docker
    • Coolify
    • GitHub Actions
    • Cloudflare

▸ Languages

  • Arabic Native
  • English Professional
  • French Basic

▸ Based in

  • Meknes, Morocco
  • GMT+1

▸ Mode

  • Remote-only
  • Async-friendly
  • Long engagements

Got a project in mind?

I take on a handful of senior / lead / advisory engagements each year. First call is on me — I'll tell you honestly if it's a fit.

Get in touch → Book a 15-min intro