Junaid Gool
Senior software engineer in Cape Town. I build the backend systems and customer-facing interfaces that keep self-service banking running, and a set of AI systems I ship on my own.
What I do
I have spent eight years building backend systems, APIs, channel services, and the customer-facing interfaces on top of them. Most of that work is in banking: self-service terminals deployed across 880+ branches, the channel and orchestration layers behind them, and event-driven services that have to make a decision in the request path and never lose a record of why.
The through-line is reliability under real conditions. A kiosk in a branch far from anywhere has a flaky link and a customer standing in front of it. That constraint shapes how I build: retries and timeouts you can reason about, graceful degradation instead of dead screens, and failure modes chosen on purpose rather than discovered in production.
I would rather ship a system that fails in a way I chose than one that works until the first thing I did not plan for.
How I got here
I did not start in software. My first career was mechanical and structural design, work where a mistake shows up in a physical thing that has to hold. Moving into software did not change the habit, it just changed the material. I still start from the constraints, design for the load, and treat the edge cases as the real job rather than an afterthought.
That background is also why I am comfortable across the stack. I have had to understand a whole system to make one part of it safe, from the interface a customer taps to the service that answers it.
Outside the day job
On my own time I build AI systems end to end: a multi-model deliberation engine, an autonomous research platform, a self-editing agent studio. They are where I try ideas that do not fit inside a single team's remit, and they keep me close to the parts of the craft that are moving fastest. You can see them in the selected work.
How I work now
I use AI agents to build fast, and I treat every confident AI report as unverified until production proves it. This site was partly built that way: the agent once reported everything fixed while the live site was still broken. Catching that gap is the job. Eight years supporting banking systems taught me to trust telemetry, not claims.
Where I am
Based in Cape Town, working with teams anywhere. Open to remote engineering roles, and to work you need to trust with real money and real customers. If you have backend or channel work, or a hard problem that needs an outside pair of hands, the fastest way to reach me is on the contact page.