Chief Technology Officer · Kakushin.io LTD

10+ years architecting real-time, IoT, and enterprise systems.

CTO of a Cyprus-registered software company — 15 internal products and 24 client engagements across web, native iOS and Android, and desktop, built by a distributed team of around twenty over two time zones. Hands-on in the parts that decide whether a system holds: WebRTC transport and NAT traversal, BLE and device telemetry, integration onto enterprise systems of record, relay-proxy architecture that keeps API keys out of shipped binaries, certificate pinning, release gating and penetration-test remediation. Those thirty-nine are the portfolio today; the count since 2013 is past a hundred, many of them early-stage products taken from a first build to paying customers, with the founders advised on the technology decisions that got them there.

Before that, a decade on real-time communications: WebRTC telemedicine shipped to clinicians from 2015, a proprietary protocol for streaming application control over a data channel, and the transport problems underneath both — NAT traversal, TURN relay economics, congestion control.

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Asghar Ali, Chief Technology Officer at Kakushin.io LTD

Currently

Chief Technology Officer

Kakushin.io LTD · since Oct 2023

Chaudhary Asghar Ali · Cyprus · Pakistan
  • Kakushin.io LTD · Cyprus
  • SwotKnot · Boulder, CO
  • RYZA · Palo Alto, CA
  • PAO · Boulder, CO
  • Open Dynamics · Selangor, Malaysia
  • CASE University · Islamabad

Scope

What sits under the role.

100+

Projects delivered

39 under technical ownership today

~20

People in the organisation

12 engineers, plus design and QA

45

Repositories migrated

To company-owned source control

30+

Live production domains

Across the estate

Current role

CTO at Kakushin.

The figures above are the job on paper. The film is the company’s own: a walk through the office, past the people who build what is listed below.

Made by Kakushin: the hall, the web and design teams at their desks, the CTO office and the meeting room.

Oct 2023 — Present

Chief Technology Officer

Kakushin.io LTD · Cyprus

Technical direction across a 39-project portfolio; a distributed team of ~20 over two time zones; infrastructure, security posture, release governance and vendor strategy.

kakushin.io

Selected work

Four of the thirty-nine, chosen for what they demanded rather than what they earned.

Regulated · under subcontract

National electricity utility — customer apps

Dual native iOS and Android customer applications for a European national electricity utility, delivered under subcontract. 60+ screens over 8 backend services, dual-brand builds, and a fortnightly two-platform release cadence.

Coordinator and escalation owner across seven external engineering counterparties. Drove third-party penetration-test remediation gating production acceptance, and introduced a relay-proxy architecture that removed every client API key from the shipped binaries. Custom EN/EL localisation and certificate pinning.

  • SwiftUI
  • Kotlin · Compose
  • Keycloak
  • Azure APIM
  • Oracle CC&B
Multi-vendor marketplace

BookMi

Visit

Booking and events marketplace spanning venues, packages and transport, with web, admin and React Native surfaces. The most service-dependent product in the portfolio.

Production-freeze governance on main while go-live was withheld; the merge gate on daily client-feedback releases; escrow and payout change control; OTP-path risk analysis. Established a 233-test Playwright suite against 148 documented use cases.

  • Node.js
  • React Native
  • MongoDB Atlas
  • Stripe
  • Twilio
Healthcare

Dementia Buddy

Visit

Consumer dementia-support app plus a care-provider portal with a twelve-module caregiver training curriculum. Five distinct account types, and a BLE wearable module with proximity, panic alerts and GPS breadcrumbs.

Access-hygiene review on a healthcare dataset, PII handling review, LLM cost attribution and endpoint-abuse analysis, and App Store submission through to approval.

  • Next.js
  • React Native
  • Firestore
  • MongoDB
  • OpenAI
Internal product · live revenue

AI Humanizer

Visit

AI-text detection and humanisation SaaS — the portfolio product carrying real subscription revenue. Full admin console covering users, subscriptions, credits, abuse and fraud, marketing, email and system health.

Runs its own email service with self-managed DKIM and delivery tracking, rather than depending on a third-party sender.

  • Vercel
  • Firestore
  • OpenAI
  • Stripe
  • Custom SMTP

Portfolio

The rest of the estate, project by project.

Everything else under technical ownership with a public surface, product demos you can try (one of them a system running in production), and prototypes built to show an approach, each labelled as such. Every link was live when this page was last built; anything offline, or withheld by its client, is named without one rather than linked to a dead page.

3 live · 4 in QA · 1 in progress · 8 delivered · 1 ended

Live

Fleet telematics

Autom8

GPS fleet telematics with live vehicle video: device protocol servers on TCP/UDP, HLS transcoding through FFmpeg, and a deployment runbook onto the client’s own server.

  • Node.js
  • MongoDB
  • FFmpeg · HLS
  • TCP/UDP servers
  • Postfix · DKIM
autom8.kakushin.io
In progress

Security · desktop

PatrolSense Bridge

Electron desktop application bridging local IP cameras to a security cloud: ONVIF discovery, interval and motion-triggered snapshots, live streaming through an embedded MediaMTX, bundled FFmpeg and a native camera-comms module, on Windows, macOS and Linux.

  • Electron
  • Native module
  • ONVIF
  • MediaMTX
  • FFmpeg
No public link
Live

Wellbeing · subscription

MT4Life

Subscription wellbeing platform with an EQ assessment, on web and iOS. Owned the App Store submission, the paid-gate launch and the transactional-email cutover.

  • React Native · iOS
  • MongoDB
  • OpenAI
  • Postmark
  • Render
mt4life.com
Live

Education · AI

Aicademiae

Automated pedagogical pipeline generating CEFR-aligned English lesson material, with the language model as the product rather than an add-on.

  • OpenAI
  • MongoDB
  • Render
aicademiae.com
QA

Travel · payments

Park2goAirport

Airport parking booking and payments for the Greek market, on Stripe.

  • Vercel
  • MongoDB
  • Stripe
  • Resend
  • Cloudflare
park2goairport.gr
QA

Dental imaging

DentalScanCenter

Dental imaging centre portal with admin and scan-centre roles.

  • Render
  • MongoDB
dentalscancenter.com
QA

Investment matching

InvestLoop

Investor-to-founder matching platform with Stripe billing and model-assisted matching.

  • Vercel
  • MongoDB
  • OpenAI
  • Stripe
investloop.founders12.com
QA

Clinical health

AINTE

Clinical health platform with admin and patient roles.

  • Hetzner
  • MongoDB
  • OpenAI
ainte.org
Delivered

Web3 · fan engagement

Arena 2

Web3 fan-engagement platform on client-managed Firebase.

  • Vercel
  • Firebase
arenatwo.com
Delivered

Hospitality

Dinabite

Hospitality and restaurant platform; the second version moved onto company infrastructure.

  • Hetzner
  • VPS
app.dinabite.ai
Delivered

DeFi

Delta Prime

DeFi platform on a client-managed VPS.

  • Client VPS
deltaprime.io
Delivered

DeFi

DegenPrime

DeFi platform on company-hosted infrastructure.

  • Hetzner
degenprime.io
Delivered

Consumer payments

Paiback

Consumer payments application.

paiback.app
Ended

Home services

EcoClean

Cleaning-services platform for the Cyprus market.

  • Vercel
  • MongoDB
ecoclean.com.cy
Delivered

Dental practice · fintech

Dentalbox and SplitShare

Dental practice platform with a delivery-partner integration, and the bill-splitting Android app on Firebase Functions it integrates.

  • Android
  • Firebase Functions
No public link
Delivered

E-commerce

Monvasi

Greek olive-oil B2C marketplace with myData invoicing.

No public link
Delivered

Short-let rentals

MyBnb

Short-let rental platform.

  • Hetzner
  • MongoDB
No public link

Built personally

The tooling the engineering function runs on.

A CTO who still ships. Each of these was written by hand, not procured, and each is in daily use across the portfolio.

CTO Dashboard

An Electron and SQLite desktop application joining Slack, GitHub and the in-house tracker: live presence, hours reconciled against what was claimed, scrum compliance, commit scan across the portfolio, and cross-project release tracking.

Automated PR pipeline

Sweep → review → fix → merge → deploy → announce → release, driven by the Claude Agent SDK behind a code-level preflight that refuses draft PRs, protected branches and secret-shaped diffs.

Dashboard MCP server

The same database exposed to any LLM session as twelve read-only tools, each answer carrying a freshness block and the caveats a reader would otherwise get wrong.

SprintForge

An in-house Jira replacement — projects, sprints, issues, releases, boards — adopted company-wide as the system of record, and exposed as an MCP server for LLM-driven workflows.

Outbound engine

Lead sourcing → dedupe and enrichment → Gmail and LinkedIn sequencing, with per-campaign caps, RFC 822 threading so replies land in the right conversation, reply, bounce and opt-out handling, and a campaign ledger.

Operational knowledge base

Around sixty documents covering the portfolio, infrastructure, access model, playbooks and engagement history — the reference the whole function runs against, and what the dashboard and the MCP server answer from.

Open source

Two libraries, for the cases the defaults miss.

Author · 2016 · MIT

oajax.js

GitHubRead the guide
$npm install oajax.js

Offline-first requests for the browser. Reads fall back to a local cache when the server is unreachable; writes that fail go to an outbox on the device and are replayed in order, each with the same idempotency key, when the connection returns. Rewritten as v2 in 2026: fetch-based, no dependencies, with a jQuery-style adapter for v1 apps.

Written for PhoneGap and Cordova applications, where the hard part was never the interface but what happens to a request made on a train. It is a drop-in replacement for a jQuery AJAX call: the same call shape, a different guarantee.

  • TypeScript
  • fetch
  • IndexedDB
  • jQuery adapter
  • PWA / Cordova / Capacitor

Author · 2026 · MIT

call-a11y

GitHubLive demo
$npm install call-a11y

Accessibility building blocks for real-time call UIs. It takes the events from whatever call stack you use and decides what a screen reader is told, and when: joins batched into one line, recording and dropped connections announced at once, live captions that can be read without being read aloud, and keyboard shortcuts that respect WCAG 2.1.4. Zero dependencies, with optional React bindings.

It is the advice in my essay on what a screen reader user hears in a video call, written as tested code. It has 129 unit tests and 13 checks in real Chrome, and has not yet been run with a real screen reader, which the project says plainly and asks people who use one to help with.

  • TypeScript
  • ARIA live regions
  • WCAG 2.2
  • React
  • WebRTC
  • Vitest
  • axe-core
  • Playwright

History

Ten years, mostly spent on things that had to work in real time.

  1. Oct 2023 — Present

    Chief Technology Officer

    Current

    Kakushin.io LTD · Cyprus

    Technical direction across a 39-project portfolio; a distributed team of ~20 over two time zones; infrastructure, security posture, release governance and vendor strategy.

  2. Sep 2021 — Oct 2023

    Lead Developer

    SwotKnot · Boulder, CO

    Learning platform matching students to tutors by learning style using in-house machine-learning models. React front end, Node.js services.

    From SwotKnot’s own channel, August 2022: the company introducing its team, in under a minute. Watch on YouTube
  3. Feb 2020 — Sep 2021

    Lead Developer & Software Architect

    RYZA · Palo Alto, CA

    Real-time co-creation platform allowing multiple people to remote-control software from the browser. Designed the architecture around WebRTC and a proprietary protocol for streaming application control over a data channel.

  4. Oct 2018 — Jan 2020

    Backend Developer

    PAO · Boulder, CO

    Node.js services, deployments and releases for a local-discovery media marketplace.

    From PAO’s own channel, August 2019: the company’s CEO and CFO travelling through Pakistan. Watch on YouTube
  5. Jun 2017 — Sep 2018

    Cross-Platform App Developer

    Open Dynamics · Selangor, Malaysia

    Mobile, Angular front ends and Java back ends for Malaysian government software, including four shipped Play Store applications.

  6. Jun 2016 — May 2017

    Research Associate — Full-Stack & Telemedicine Engineer

    CASE University · Islamabad

    Built CHART, a WebRTC clinical research tool for detailed remote examination of patients, shipped on both app stores and used by clinicians and medical students. Lead telemedicine engineer on a wearable ECG device. PhoneGap and AngularJS on the front, Express on the back.

  7. Jan 2015 — Mar 2016

    Full-Stack & Cross-Platform Developer

    CASE University · Islamabad

    Joined part-time in the third year of the degree, on the team behind AL-BASR — telemedicine software that won a 2015 P@SHA ICT Award. Built its real-time chat and video conferencing over WebRTC, and the digital examination system with its Android app.

Earlier work

Independent contracts, and the university projects underneath all of it.

Independent projects

  • HAJJ crowd management — indoor tracking and density estimation

    BLE wristbands tracking a workforce indoors during HAJJ, with web and Android navigation apps, plus a separate crowd-density estimation system reading CCTV footage through image processing.

    NOVSYS · Saudi Arabia

  • School management system

    Administration, enrolment and records for a private school group.

    Cabin School System · Rawalpindi

  • Cloud-based fingerprint attendance system

    Biometric attendance capture reporting into a hosted back end.

    Cabin School System · Rawalpindi

  • Forex trading bot

    Automated MetaTrader strategy execution, entry and exit rules driven by the programmed strategy.

    Independent · MQL4

  • Clinic management system

    Patient records, appointments and billing for a dental practice.

    Al-Dika Dental Clinic · Libya

  • Barcode fee-slip verification

    Verification of printed fee slips at the counter by barcode rather than by eye.

    CASE University · Islamabad

  • SMS result and attendance system

    Results and attendance pushed to parents over SMS.

    National Schools & Colleges · Islamabad

  • RFID gate-entry system

    Access control on a site gate, RFID readers into a central log.

    V3 Solution Pvt Ltd · Rawalpindi

Final-year project

A fog computing architecture, implemented in Node.js

Analysed the case for fog computing, designed the architecture, built a working implementation, and worked out the placement of the fog layer inside an SDN environment. The same question — how far from the data the computation should sit — is the one that governs real-time and inference placement now.

Semester projects

  • SMPP server with web portal (PHP)
  • eLearning system (PHP)
  • Talking robot (JS, AI)
  • Stock trend analysis (data mining)
  • Colour-based object tracking (C#)
  • Remote oil-reservoir control (Arduino, Node.js)
  • Publisher/subscriber IoT stack (Node.js)
  • MQTT broker (Node.js)
  • Wireless ad-hoc chat room (Android)
  • FPS and car-racing games (Unity 3D)
  • Car tracking over GSM/GPS (8051)
  • WebRTC video conferencing
  • RC car over parallel port
  • Multi-server queue simulator
  • Critical-temperature SMS alert (8051)
  • Web-based home monitoring (Arduino)
  • POV display, 2D plotter and radar (Arduino)

Stack

What I actually work in.

Languages & frameworks

  • TypeScript
  • Node.js
  • React
  • Next.js
  • React Native
  • Electron
  • Swift / SwiftUI
  • Kotlin / Compose
  • Python

Real-time & media

  • WebRTC
  • SRTP / DTLS
  • TURN / coturn
  • FFmpeg
  • HLS
  • MediaMTX

Data

  • MongoDB
  • Firestore
  • PostgreSQL
  • Redis
  • SQLite

Cloud & infrastructure

  • Vercel
  • Cloudflare
  • Hetzner
  • Render
  • Firebase
  • nginx / PM2

AI

  • OpenAI API
  • Anthropic Claude
  • Claude Agent SDK
  • MCP server authoring

Practice

  • Architecture review
  • Release governance
  • Accessibility · WCAG 2.2 AA
  • JAWS · NVDA · VoiceOver testing
  • Playwright
  • GitHub Actions
  • Pen-test remediation

Research

Where the computation should sit, and how to secure it.

Fog & edge computing

My final-year work implemented a fog computing architecture in Node.js, including placement of the fog layer inside an SDN environment. The premise — push computation toward where data is produced rather than hauling it to a distant cloud — is the same one that now governs how real-time and inference workloads get placed.

  • Fog architecture
  • SDN placement
  • Latency budgets

Edge AI

Running inference next to the sensor rather than in a datacentre: model partitioning between device and edge node, the accuracy traded for latency and power, and the operational reality of shipping model updates to hardware you cannot SSH into.

  • On-device inference
  • Model partitioning
  • Update pipelines

Indoor positioning with BLE beacons

GPS stops at the door, and the products that most need to know where someone is are usually indoors. I have shipped a BLE tracker and wearable pendant with proximity and panic alerting, which is the tractable half of the problem. The hard half is the one I keep reading on: RSSI is a noisy, multipath-corrupted proxy for distance, so useful accuracy comes from fingerprinting and filtering rather than from the path-loss model — and every gain in precision is paid for in beacon density, calibration effort and coin-cell life.

  • RSSI / trilateration
  • Fingerprinting
  • Beacon density vs. battery

AI & cyber security

Two directions at once. AI as a defensive instrument — anomaly detection over traffic and behaviour. And AI as new attack surface: prompt injection, tool-call abuse, model and data exfiltration, and the supply-chain question of what a generated dependency actually contains.

  • Prompt injection
  • Tool-call abuse
  • Anomaly detection

Real-time communication

The oldest thread and still the deepest: WebRTC telemedicine from 2015, remote-control streaming protocols, and the transport problems — NAT traversal, relay economics, congestion control — that never stopped being interesting.

  • WebRTC
  • Telemedicine
  • Transport

Education & recognition

Where it started.

BSc Computer Science

CASE University, Islamabad · 2012 — 2016

Affiliated with UET Taxila

Major subjects

  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Image Processing
  • Computer Graphics
  • Computer Communications & Networking
  • Network Security & Cryptography
  • Compiler Construction
  • Object-Oriented Programming
  • Data Structures
  • Software Engineering
  • Automata Theory
  • Web Engineering

Languages

English · Urdu · Punjabi

Recognition

  • 2015

    P@SHA ICT Award

    Team member on AL-BASR, the CASE University telemedicine platform that won a Pakistan Software Houses Association ICT Award.

  • FAST University

    IEEE Coding Race — 2nd place

    Second of twenty-five university teams.

  • Iqra University

    Speed programming — 4th place

    Fourth of fifty competing teams.

  • CASE University

    MALTA

    Built and ran an SMS-based group communication system used by more than 500 people across the university.

Writing

Notes on judgment, and what the tools changed.

6 Nov 202610 min

API keys in mobile apps: why they leak and the relay fix

Any API key shipped in a mobile or front-end app can be recovered. Keep it on a relay proxy, then give that relay auth, rate limits and a hard spend cap.

  • AI app security
  • Mobile security
5 Nov 20266 min · video

One laptop, $6.3 billion: what the Binance hack teaches anyone who ships code

Binance's own report traces its $6.34 billion loss to a tampered installer, a fake job assignment and a deployment token on an engineer's computer. I rebuilt that shape in my own lab with fake money, wiped out a hot wallet and its logs without touching the private key, then fixed it, demonstrated on Kali Linux.

  • Security
  • AI-assisted development
3 Nov 202610 min

AI agent tool permissions: least privilege for LLM agents

Least privilege for AI agents: scope each tool, split read from write, run as the user, confirm irreversible actions and log every call. With a review table.

  • AI app security
  • AI agents
All writing

Contact

Open to conversations about engineering leadership, real-time systems, and portfolios that have outgrown their process.

ch.asghar.ali.071@gmail.com
GitHubCurriculum vitae
Role
Chief Technology Officer
Based
Cyprus · Pakistan