How I got here,
mistakes included.
Late nights in production, a move across continents, and a fully funded PhD I turned down. Pick a year.
I had to know what was underneath
I got into computers because I couldn’t stand not knowing what sat underneath them. At school I stayed late writing programs that did nothing useful at all. The whole point was proving the machine would do exactly what I told it to, no more and no less. University was where that stubbornness turned into something someone would pay for.
I pushed my professors to put me on real projects instead of graded assignments. I was the student who stayed after class to ask whether I could help build something, not what would be on the exam. Outside of class I took every Java course and web design workshop I could get into, and squeezed in internships whenever someone would have me.
First real code. First real consequences.
I joined Apadana Company as a Junior Web Developer, building server-side features across four enterprise web platforms in a small in-house team: role-based access control, a booking engine, real-time messaging modules.
That job taught me the thing no course covers: there is no undo. When a bug reaches production and real people walk into it, it feels nothing like a red test in your editor. Someone is already on the phone, and the fix has to be right the first time. That pressure permanently changed how I think about software. Get it right, not just running.
I arrived writing code. I left designing systems.
I joined Hooshmand Sazan Company as a Junior Java Developer in November 2014 and moved into the senior engineering role in February 2016. Bigger systems, higher expectations, and senior engineers who were a lot less forgiving than I was used to. I arrived knowing how to write code and left knowing how to design systems, and why the design matters more than the code.
Alongside the job I finished my M.Sc. in Artificial Intelligence at the University of Isfahan. Studying machine learning seriously changes how you design: you stop treating software as a deterministic machine and start designing for uncertainty. That shift still shows up in how I approach architecture.
I was offered a place in a PhD program with a full scholarship, and turned it down. I had spent enough time watching good ideas stay ideas. I wanted to build things that ran in production, with real people on the other end.
They didn’t just offer a job, they moved me
I had already decided to move abroad when SMS GmbH in Dresden reached out. They didn’t just offer a job, they sponsored the whole relocation. A new country, a new language and a new codebase, all in the same month.
Over the years at SMS I grew from writing services to shaping the systems around them: owning architecture decisions, taking build and release automation end to end, cutting latency through profiling, and introducing engineering practices that actually stuck, from automated testing to structured code reviews.
Architecture, and the team around it
In 2024 I took over the technical concept for the product at SMS GmbH: architecture decisions and technical direction. Along the way the scope grew outward into DevOps, frontend and mobile, and into leading the team that builds it.
The tools have changed beyond recognition since I started. What drives me hasn’t: understand how it works, then leave it better than you found it.
Berlin, and six apps that started as questions
After several years in Dresden I moved to Berlin, where I still work for SMS GmbH, these days hybrid.
Outside of work I’ve shipped six small iOS apps to the App Store. Different stack, different constraints, same instinct: I don’t really understand something until I’ve built it.
websitehaus.de: building for people I can actually talk to
This year I started my own business, websitehaus.de, designing websites and building apps for other businesses. After years of large backend systems for one employer, I wanted to work directly with the people who actually use what I build, and to hear about it when they don’t like something.
The work is deliberately end to end: design the site, build it, and ship the mobile app alongside it when a business needs one. The same engineering standards I hold at work, at a scale where one person can own the whole thing. I run it in my free time, alongside my role at SMS GmbH.
