Staff Engineer · Toronto

Zubier
Abdullah

Senior Developer → Staff Engineer

8 years building resilient, compliant, and high-throughput systems in banking and financial regulation. I architect solutions that scale, mentor teams that ship, and drive technical strategy across complex regulatory domains.

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Angular TypeScript Node.js AWS System Design Regulatory Tech Distributed Systems
👨🏽‍💻
// open to opportunities

About

What I bring to the table

My career sits at the intersection of deep technical execution and broad organisational impact — the hallmark of a Staff Engineer.

🏗️
System Architecture
Designed and delivered large-scale event-driven platforms processing millions of regulatory messages per day. Comfortable owning entire technical domains — from data ingestion to client-facing APIs.
🏦
Banking & Regulation Domain
Deep expertise in financial regulation reporting, compliance workflows, and the nuanced requirements of MiFID II, EMIR, and similar frameworks. I speak both engineer and regulator.
🧭
Technical Leadership
Led cross-functional squads, defined engineering standards, and ran architecture reviews. I create leverage — enabling teams to move faster with fewer mistakes.
☁️
Cloud & Infrastructure
Built and maintained production AWS infrastructure — Lambda, ECS, API Gateway, SQS/SNS, Aurora — with infrastructure-as-code (CDK / Terraform) and CI/CD at its core.

Portfolio

Selected Projects

A cross-section of the systems I've architected and shipped. Details are illustrative — reach out for deeper dives.

📊
Regulatory Reporting Engine
Event-driven platform for real-time trade reporting under MiFID II. Handles enrichment, validation, and submission of millions of records daily with zero-downtime deployments.
Node.js AWS SQS TypeScript MiFID II
🔐
Compliance Dashboard
Angular 17 SPA giving compliance officers a real-time view of reporting status, exception queues, and audit trails. Introduced design system with accessible component library.
Angular TypeScript RxJS Design System
⚡
API Gateway Migration
Led migration of a monolithic banking API to a microservices architecture on AWS — cutting latency by 60% and enabling independent team deployments with no shared release trains.
AWS Lambda API Gateway Microservices CDK
🤖
Smart Reconciliation Tool
Internal tool using ML-assisted pattern matching to flag reconciliation breaks in trade data before they become regulatory incidents — reduced manual review hours by 40%.
Node.js AWS Bedrock Aurora FinTech

Career

8 years in the making

From first commit to technical strategy — building across banking, regulation, and financial infrastructure.

Senior Developer
May 2022 — Present
Bank of Montreal · Toronto, ON
Building BMO's business banking platform serving 200K+ business customers. Shipped a payment search module that cut wire payment creation from 5+ minutes to under 60 seconds. Led a microfrontend migration from AngularJS to Angular 19, moved CI/CD to GitHub Actions halving build times, and helped hire and mentor 10+ developers. Finished top 10 at the TPS-VEF Hackathon 2025 with a cloud invoicing prototype in AWS, Java, and Angular.
Software Developer
Feb 2021 — May 2022
Thentia Inc. · Toronto, ON
Designed a reusable onboarding framework for regulatory agency clients, dramatically reducing time-to-launch for new portals. Integrated Stripe payments and multilingual support into client-facing platforms. A focused legacy refactor drove a 40% reduction in support ticket volume.
Software Developer
Sep 2018 — Feb 2021
Bank of Montreal (via TCS) · Toronto, ON
Worked on the Online Banking for Business platform, owning the Portal Decommission project and PPCD Change Detection API. Coordinated daily standups with an offshore team and managed production releases through Bamboo and Artifactory.
M.Eng. — Electrical & Computer Engineering
2016 — 2018
Toronto Metropolitan University (Ryerson) · Toronto, ON
Graduate engineering degree underpinning the systems thinking and rigorous problem-solving approach I bring to every technical challenge.

Certifications

Credentials

Formal recognition across cloud architecture and emerging AI technologies.

AWS Certified Developer — Associate
Amazon Web Services
Verified
AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
Amazon Web Services
Verified
Gen AI For All
BMO
Verified

Writing

Published Fiction & Short Stories

Engineering teaches you to think in systems. Fiction teaches you to think in people. I've always done both — and I think the best technical writing happens when you can't tell the difference.

✍️
Published
Author
Short Story
Mere Memory
A piece of short fiction exploring the fragile, reconstructed nature of memory and the stories we tell ourselves to make sense of the past.
Dhaka Tribune — Arts & Letters
Short Story
On the Off Chance
A short fiction piece about chance, consequence, and the small moments that quietly redirect an entire life.
Dhaka Tribune — Arts & Letters
Short Story
Anniversary
A short story about time, ritual, and the weight of what we choose to commemorate — and what we quietly let go.
Dhaka Tribune — Arts & Letters
Opinion & Essays
She Should Have Been Sitting Inside a Tank Dhaka Tribune Is Anyone Policing the Thought Police? Dhaka Tribune The Monsters We All Are Dhaka Tribune No Smoking if You Are a Woman Dhaka Tribune Tuition in Blood Dhaka Tribune The Dangers of Being Judgemental The Daily Star

Connect

Let's talk

I'm currently exploring Staff Engineer and senior technical leadership roles. If you're building something ambitious in fintech, banking infrastructure, or regulated systems — I'd love to hear about it.