The full story
I'm Ehsan Gazar, a Principal Engineer who writes, mentors, and builds products. Fifteen years of shipping software, making mistakes, and learning from both.
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gazar.dev is a brand and portfolio operated by QUEEK LIMITED.
From Tehran to London
No connections, no pedigree, just a borrowed laptop and a habit of figuring things out.
Wrote my first line of code in Tehran. No CS degree yet, just curiosity and a borrowed laptop.
Moved to the other side of the world. Learned what it means to build software that real people depend on.
Principal Engineer in London. Writing, mentoring, and building products, still learning every day.
What I care about
Three things I keep coming back to.
Build
Systems where clarity, accessibility, and developer experience come first.
Mentor
Engineers, because the best way to learn something is to teach it.
Write
About the hard parts, because that's where the real lessons are.
Professional experience
The roles that taught me the most, each one pushed me into problems I hadn't solved before.
Software Engineer
Tipalti • London, UK
- Ship features for Procurement and Tipalti's core payment products. Thousands of global customers depend on what we build -- automation, usability, and reliability are non-negotiable.
- Organized and led company-wide "AI Weeks" -- prototyped AI-powered tools that cut manual work and sparked collaboration across teams. Innovation needs structure, not just enthusiasm.
- Architect scalable cloud solutions and mentor mid-level and junior engineers. Growing people is the highest-leverage work a senior engineer can do.
- Drive engineering quality through code reviews, architecture docs, and decision records. Good documentation is not overhead -- it's how distributed teams stay aligned.
- Work across product, design, and engineering to make sure what we build actually solves the business problem, not just the technical one.
Principal Engineer | Leadership
Mecca Brands • Melbourne, Austarlia
- Led a team of 5 engineers (4 frontend, 1 .NET) and owned 5 of 11 apps in a microfrontend + microservices architecture. Pushed clean code through reviews, pairing, and knowledge sharing.
- Owned the full release pipeline -- from code through QA, performance testing, monitoring, and production e2e tests. Wrote the technical specs and broke down tickets so the team could move independently.
- Cut 5 seconds off the service booking journey and pushed NPS up by 5 points. Got the homepage loading under 2 seconds using caching, Lambda routing, SSR, and rendering optimizations.
- Stayed 70% hands-on. Deep work in frontend, SSR, microfrontend dependency management, CI/CD, AWS, and production debugging with Datadog and CloudWatch.
Principal Engineer | Leadership
IE Digital • Melbourne, Australia
- Led engineering for Toyota Australia, Lexus Australia, and AGL. Built digital experiences on Sitecore and React that shipped to millions of users.
- Designed and built a design system and a tablet application for Australia Post. Both got recognized at the Toyota and Australia Post headquarters -- real client impact.
- Worked with a team of 5 developers and graduates. Small teams move fast, but only if everyone is aligned. I invested heavily in mentoring and pair programming.
- Ran hackathons for Toyota and IE engineers. Hackathons done right are not about the output -- they're about giving people permission to experiment.
- Stayed 70% hands-on. Built design systems, Storybook libraries, and the Australia Post tablet app. Also shipped Card.gift as a side project.
Principal Engineer | Leadership
Sportsbet • Melbourne, Australia
Senior Full Stack Engineer
CHE Proximity • Melbourne, Australia
Senior Front-end Engineer
CHE Proximity • Melbourne, Australia
Lead JavaScript Developer
Round Table Apps • Sydney, Australia
Lead Full-Stack JavaScript Developer
PersianGig Company • Tehran, Iran
Senior Backend Developer
Netbarg • Tehran, Iran
Co-Founder at Atys Consultancy Agency
Atys Co. • Tehran, Iran
Education
BSc in Computer Science • K.N.Toosi University of Technology (2008 – 2013)
Talks & presentations
I speak at conferences and meetups about the things I've learned the hard way.