Ali Saleem London, UK

I build the systems a business runs on.

Ten years of PHP and Laravel across e-commerce platforms, systems integration and the infrastructure underneath. Owning technical strategy while staying hands-on in the codebase.

Since 2016

Awards

2025

King's Award for Enterprise: International Trade

Awarded to We Get Any Stock, where I act as fractional CTO.

2025

SME National Business Awards - Silver, Website of the Year

For the B2B e-commerce platform I architected and built.

2017

ECMOD Direct Commerce Award - Best Exploitation of Technology

For the Magento 2 B2C platform I led as backend developer.

Previous work

We Get Any Stock

  • Fractional CTO for a B2B FMCG wholesaler, owning all technical strategy and leading a team of four while remaining hands-on in the codebase. Architected and built in-house the full suite of interconnected systems the business runs on. The company was awarded the King's Award for Enterprise: International Trade in 2025.
  • Built the B2B e-commerce platform listing around 20,000 products with live pricing aggregated from multiple suppliers. It consistently ranks among the top Google results for FMCG barcode searches, at times above the manufacturers themselves and major retailers such as Tesco. The platform was named a Silver winner for Website of the Year at the 2025 SME National Business Awards.
  • Built a barcode-driven warehouse management system covering the full stock lifecycle, from inbound receiving to put-away location to loading, minimising picking errors through end-to-end scanning. It runs rolling stock takes to keep physical and recorded quantities in sync, and generates sales, buyer, stock-level and ageing reports.
  • Built owner-facing reporting, from item level up to monthly and quarterly summaries, plus a marketing platform integrated with the storefront for multi-channel promotions. Heavy backend workloads across all systems run through a job queue, including supplier price imports, product updates, mailshots and report generation.

Windsor Cars

  • Built a set of AI agents on the open-source Hermes agent framework (Nous Research) to automate routine business operations, saving the company around four hours of manual work per day.
  • Developed around 15 custom skills spanning four automated task pipelines. Tasks that did not require an LLM were implemented as deterministic skills, and longer pipelines were broken into stages with heartbeat events so their progress could be tracked.
  • Integrated the agents with the company's systems, adding an MCP server to an existing Laravel application for secure data access and connecting accounting, CRM and AutoTrader through their APIs.
  • Applied a least-privilege model across everything the agents could reach, granting each integration only the access it needed. Vehicle images synced through Dropbox, for example, were readable by the agent but never editable or deletable.

Aris Technologies

  • Led a team of four developers modernising a legacy PHP CMS that ran as three out-of-sync instances, deployed by manual FTP with a 50% failure rate. Reconciled the codebases into a single configuration-driven repository and enforced zero-downtime deploys via Bitbucket Pipelines, cutting deployment incidents to near zero within two months and taking releases from monthly to multiple times per day.
  • Rebuilt the CMS from scratch on Laravel, closing authentication and authorisation gaps left by the original vanilla PHP. Migrated feature-by-feature from the old system so staff could adopt the new platform gradually and the business saw continuous progress rather than a single high-risk cutover, using Laravel Nova for the content-management backend.
  • Reviewed usage and re-architected content delivery to handle traffic spikes that were taking the site down during promotions (around 90% uptime). Rather than over-provision servers, moved public content-serving to Cloudflare Pages backed by Cloudflare KV, with the Laravel backend writing to KV and a SvelteKit front end reading from the edge. This cut cost to a fraction of scaling infrastructure while removing the servers and database from the hot path.
  • Built internal tooling to govern deployments, enforcing role-based control over who could deploy and roll back and requiring artifacts to pass through staging before production, alongside review environments for sharing in-progress work with the wider business for feedback.

Surrey Motors

  • Built a Laravel integration platform connecting vehicle data providers, communication services, CRM and accounting systems with AutoTrader, MOT History and Dropbox to automate the dealership's vehicle advertising and sales workflows.
  • Automated listing creation end to end. The platform populated full vehicle specifications and history from a registration number, provided pricing guidance, generated advert descriptions from each vehicle's features, and kept listings in sync with forecourt stock.
  • Automated staff task generation at key workflow stages, such as prompting documentation once a vehicle had been purchased or photography after a valet.
  • Built a monitoring dashboard over the platform's queued jobs, recording when and why each job ran, who triggered it, and surfacing any failures.

Netmatter

  • As the lead backend developer, built the Magento 2 B2C platform that won the 2017 ECMOD Direct Commerce Award for Best Exploitation of Technology.
  • Led development of the company's iPaaS integration platform, connecting hundreds of client e-commerce stores to their ERP, accounting, courier and CRM systems via REST and SOAP APIs, and expanded it with further Laravel middleware applications as new third-party SaaS systems were added. These integrations automated order processing, product updates and stock management.
  • Developed bespoke plugins and extensions across dozens of internal and external Magento, WordPress and other PHP applications, tailoring functionality to each project's requirements.
  • Designed and built internal tooling and applications using Laravel.
  • Administered the dedicated physical servers hosting the iPaaS platform and all client e-commerce sites, covering provisioning, deployment, security and uptime.

Cameo UK

  • Brought in to decompose a monolithic Laravel application, owning the effort to split it into independent Composer packages so functionality could be offered as modular add-ons in a SaaS model.
  • Ported the website front end from an ageing Vue.js SPA to Livewire, simplifying the stack so the PHP-focused team could own the front end without maintaining a separate JavaScript application.

Jukebox Me

  • Owned the backend architecture for a new web platform, joining at project inception to lay the technical foundations.
  • Built a Laravel API layer designed as the single backend for multiple clients, starting with a React front end and with mobile applications planned.
  • Provisioned production and staging infrastructure on AWS, with automated zero-downtime deployments.

Emma DK

  • Restructured a vanilla PHP e-commerce application around the Slim framework and dependency injection, improving testability.
  • Cut page response times from a few seconds to under 200ms by adding a Redis cache layer and optimising database queries.
  • Built Envoyer-based deployment pipelines enabling zero-downtime releases.
  • Reduced operational costs by 50% by reviewing application usage and right-sizing the server infrastructure.

WiredScore

  • Recovered lost access to the company's AWS infrastructure and documented the full setup, removing a single point of failure and enabling future developer onboarding.
  • Cut Docker build times from around 10 minutes to under a minute by restructuring image layers and removing unused services.
  • Built a deployment pipeline on AWS ECS with autoscaling and blue/green releases, enabling zero-downtime deployments.

Hex Digital

  • Extended a Laravel e-commerce application with subscription billing and add-ons, implementing recurring payments, proration and plan management via Stripe.
  • Advised the team on modern development practices, including testing, static analysis, CI/CD pipelines and IDE configuration.

Gigabyte Software

  • Extended a Symfony application for one of the UK's largest property management companies, applying a domain-driven design approach to deliver new features around document generation and delivery.
  • Cut average page load times by 60% through query optimisation.
  • Integrated document delivery services via REST APIs to streamline daily user workflows.
  • Used Ansible to automate application deployments, making releases faster and safer.
  • Reviewed code and mentored three junior developers, pairing on tasks and establishing review standards.

Toolkit

Got a system that needs building, or rescuing?

Happy to talk through architecture, integrations, or a codebase that has stopped being fun to deploy.