Nizar Abubaker— Head of Digital Platforms
Technology leader, architect and builder. For twenty years I have moved between boardrooms, whiteboards and codebases — turning ambitious intent into platforms, products and teams that ship.
01The short version
Most technology problems are really connection problems — between systems, between teams, between what the business means and what the software does. My work is making those connections deliberate. Some days that means a board presentation; some days an integration contract; some days a pull request. I have learned not to treat those as different jobs.
Products, prototypes and production code. Close enough to the work to know what is actually hard.
Platforms, integration landscapes and the decisions that hold them together — written down, explainable, reversible where it matters.
Direction, investment cases, operating models and transformation programmes — technology framed in the language of the business.
02Selected work
A few case studies across platforms, integration, products and AI. Some clients are confidential; the work is not.
Architecture and delivery of a learning management platform serving N learners across a government organisation — integrated with identity, HR and certification systems.
Read the case study
Replacing point-to-point integrations between N core systems with contracts, events and a gateway — so data flows once, correctly, and can be traced.
Read the case study
Designing and building a multi-tenant SaaS product on Node.js and PostgreSQL — tenancy, billing hooks, permissions and a deployment pipeline small teams can live with.
Read the case study
Retrieval-augmented generation over internal documents, built around one rule: every answer must point to the paragraph it came from.
Read the case study
03What I’m useful for
Organised by the problem, not the framework. The technologies are the evidence, not the point.
When technology decisions are being made by default instead of by design.
Enterprise architecture · Agile delivery
When an organisation knows it has to change how it works, but not where to start.
Microsoft Azure · AWS · Enterprise architecture
When there is an idea, a deadline and no product yet.
Node.js · Next.js · PostgreSQL
When a platform has outgrown the architecture it was born with.
.NET · Node.js · PostgreSQL · Redis · Event-driven architecture
When ten systems hold one truth and none of them agree.
.NET · RabbitMQ · REST APIs · API gateways · Identity & SSO (OAuth2 / OIDC)
When deployments are events instead of routines.
Docker · Kubernetes · Microsoft Azure · AWS · Nginx
When everyone is talking about AI and nobody has shipped anything useful with it.
TypeScript · Large language models · Retrieval-augmented generation · pgvector · Python
When the code has become the thing slowing the business down.
C# · Node.js · TypeScript · NestJS · React
When good people are working hard and still not shipping.
Agile delivery · CI/CD
04Trajectory
Engineer, architect, leader. Each step added an altitude rather than replacing one.
2026 — Present
Head of Digital Platforms
Innovation Pulse
2022 — 2026
Solution Development Consultant
Red Bull Mobile
2019 — 2022
Application Development Lead
Lebara Mobile KSA
2016 — 2019
Senior IT Operations Specialist
GO Telecom (Etihad Atheeb)
2014 — 2016
Senior Customer Service Analyst
Huawei
2013 — 2014
Freelance Web & Mobile Developer
05How I think
Novelty is a budget. Spend it where it changes the result, not where it changes the CV.
If the reasoning lives only in someone’s head, it is not architecture yet — it is a dependency.
Systems rarely fail alone. Draw the seams first, agree the contracts early, and test the joins hardest.
A small thing in production teaches more than a large thing in a slide deck.
Org charts become architecture diagrams eventually. Design both on purpose.
06From the lab
Experiments, prototypes and side quests — AI, music, visuals and tools. Some ship. Some teach.
The animated network on the homepage: eight ideas, connected, with signals travelling between them. A single canvas, no libraries, and it stops when you are not looking.
A hidden view that draws this website as its own wireframe — every section outlined and labelled. Finding it is left as an exercise.
Notes and tests on pairing Latin and Arabic typefaces so both languages feel designed, not translated — line height, weight, numerals and mirroring.
07Notes
Essays on architecture and leadership, technical notes, and shorter thoughts.
A personal website is a small system with the same questions as a big one: where content lives, who can change it, how it is cached and what happens when something fails.
1 min read
A generated tsvector column, a GIN index and a prefix query cover a surprising amount of ground — in two languages.
1 min read
Arabic is not a translation layer. A few rules that make a bilingual interface feel native in both directions.
1 min read
08Off the clock
The same curiosity, pointed elsewhere.
What you play, listen to or make.
Your team, and how you follow the game.
Unusual applications, creative coding and things that probably should not work — but do.
A notebook of product ideas that is longer than it should be.
Contact
A platform to rethink, a team to build, an integration nobody wants to own, or an idea that needs a first version. Tell me about it.
