20+ years building & securing systems at Uber · Delivery Hero · foodpanda · SWVL · Alibaba.
Principal AI & AI-Security Architect and fractional CTO — red team & blue team, offensive & defensive. I design secure, scalable production architecture for agentic AI, guardrails, AI gateways and enterprise RAG — and pressure-test every system against ten pillars: scalability, security, AI security / guardrails, reliability, observability, governance, cost, data & RAG security, performance and DevSecOps.
# current focus role = "AI Enterprise & Security Architect" also = "Secure Agentic AI · Fractional CTO" teams = ["red team", "blue team", "offensive", "defensive"] guardrails = ["NeMo Guardrails", "OPA", "prompt-injection / jailbreak filters"] pillars = ["scalability", "security", "reliability", "observability", "governance", "cost", "data / RAG security", "performance", "DevSecOps"] governed_to = ["EU AI Act", "ISO/IEC 42001", "NIST AI RMF"] availability = "open — remote worldwide"
Most of the risk in enterprise AI isn’t the model — it’s everything around it. Here’s where I come in.
Guardrails, AI security gateways, prompt-injection and jailbreak defense, and authorized red-teaming across LLM, RAG, agent and MCP surfaces.
Scoped, authorized red-team assessments mapped to the OWASP LLM Top 10 and MITRE ATLAS, with evidence-backed findings and retest tracking.
Production-grade agent orchestration — tool permissions, approvals, memory and reliability built in from day one.
Secure, permission-aware RAG with hybrid retrieval, reranking and verified citations.
Full-stack ownership of the AI system: architecture, security, infrastructure and delivery.
CTO-level architecture design and review — every system is held against the same ten pillars, from the first diagram to production sign-off. They run through every case study below.
Horizontal scale, stateless services, sharding, load-aware autoscaling.
Zero-trust, RBAC/ABAC, secrets management, least privilege, defense in depth.
NeMo Guardrails, prompt-injection & jailbreak defense, tool sandboxing, HITL.
Fallbacks, retries, circuit breakers, graceful degradation, DR.
OpenTelemetry traces, metrics, logs, evals and cost in one pane.
AI Act / ISO 42001 / NIST AI RMF, audit trails, model & data lineage.
Routing by cost, caching, right-sized models, budget guardrails.
Permission-aware retrieval, poisoning detection, citation verification, isolation.
Latency budgets, streaming, batching, semantic caching, profiling.
IaC, CI/CD, SBOM & supply-chain scanning, typed contracts, tests.
Independent architecture and product work delivered through Spire Digi Solution (RetailGPT with Datacue — Sanabil Venture) — implementation-ready blueprints and shipped systems.
A controlled environment for finding out how your agents, RAG and MCP tools actually fail — before an attacker does.
500 structured security scenarios across 20 AI-specific domains, run by a fleet of specialized security agents.
One command center that correlates AI-native attack paths with conventional cyber findings — not two disconnected tools.
The production backbone for building, orchestrating and operating enterprise AI agents — not another agent demo.
One control plane for every LLM call in the org — routing, cost, reliability and security in one place.
RAG that respects permissions, cites its sources, and doesn’t get poisoned by a bad document.
Because “it felt fine in testing” isn’t a release process for a probabilistic system.
Ask retail data a question in plain English and get a governed, cited, multi-format answer back — safely.
Principal architect, CTO and forward-deployed engineer — owning solution architecture, AI / security strategy and end-to-end delivery.
Lead architecture and delivery of agentic AI platforms, AI security gateways and cloud-native solutions for UAE / GCC enterprise clients; cross-functional teams of 10+.
Architected RetailGPT — an agentic AI retail-analytics platform on GCP (Gemini, GPT-4, LangGraph, RAG, MCP, multi-agent) with AI / LLM security embedded end to end.
Co-founded and architected a Solana Web3 loyalty platform (tokenomics, NFT rewards, Apple / Google Wallet) and a multi-tenant Loyalty-as-a-Service SaaS at 99.9% uptime.
Voice-AI ordering, conversational agents and RAG assistants for e-commerce and food-delivery clients; cut the release cycle from two weeks to two days.
Data-Platform-as-a-Service lakehouse (space-based architecture) plus Inventory- and Transport-as-a-Service platforms; distributed teams across four countries.
Owned the full technology strategy for a B2B marketplace scaling 0 → 10,000+ MAU; shipped five products; built and mentored a 15-engineer team.
Led the technology transformation scaling to 50,000+ daily orders across food, grocery, pharmacy and milk delivery with no service disruption.
Technology transformation for a global mass-transit startup across three continents and seven cities; route & plan optimisers cut fleet cost 20%.
Demand–supply prediction (LSTM / CNN), CNN facial recognition and fraud detection, deep-learning churn prediction, and the Careem BI / analytics portal used by 50+ global leaders.
Led engineering for foodpanda.pk and eatoye.pk (Rocket Internet / Delivery Hero) with the Berlin global team; built an AI-powered BI and sales-recommender platform.
Architecture and delivery of ERP, CRM and e-commerce platforms for offshore clients across the US, Canada, UK and Australia.
Delivered 50+ enterprise software projects (ERP, HRMS, finance, supply chain, CRM); led full-stack teams of 8–12.
Consulting & advisory: Daraz.pk (Alibaba Group) · Novo Nordisk · Zalingo (Australia) · OMEN Media (UK) · MAT Dubai · Cheezious · and 10+ international brands.
I’m Asif — a Principal AI Architect and AI Security Architect with 20+ years designing, securing and scaling distributed and AI systems across healthtech, fintech, logistics, e-commerce and SaaS. 150+ software projects and 30+ AI platforms delivered as a hands-on architect and forward-deployed engineer — I embed with a team, design the system, and stay hands-on through delivery.
My focus is the security layer that makes agentic AI safe to run in production: threat modeling, NeMo Guardrails, AI security gateways, prompt-injection and jailbreak defense, red team and blue team — offensive and defensive — across LLM / RAG / agent / MCP surfaces, and governance aligned to the EU AI Act, ISO/IEC 42001 and NIST AI RMF.
As a fractional CTO and principal architect I own the whole picture: secure, scalable production architecture reviewed against ten pillars — scalability, security, AI security / guardrails, reliability & resilience, observability, governance, cost optimization, data & RAG security, performance and maintainability / DevSecOps.
Available for remote contract and project work worldwide — fractional CTO, AI security and red-team assessments, or secure, scalable architecture that needs to go from idea to production fast.