Asqar Bakir

Lead Engineer (IC)

Eindhoven, the Netherlands · [email protected] · asqar.net

[email protected] ← Back

Engineer with 15+ years combining delivery ownership with continuous hands-on work. Owned delivery for a .NET and mobile portfolio at EPAM Systems across multiple teams, while staying a working developer on it. Before that, CTO of a mid-size product company, still writing code. The eight years since have been hands-on, owning a product's mobile, web, and AI surface end to end. On the IC track by choice.

Skills

Mobile Kotlin · Kotlin Multiplatform (KMP) · Compose Multiplatform (CMP) · Android · Jetpack Compose · Kotlin Coroutines · AndroidX · native iOS (Objective-C, Swift)

AI / LLM OpenAI API (chat + embeddings) · Model Context Protocol (MCP) · retrieval-augmented search · OpenAI Agents SDK · Cloudflare Workers

Platform Docker · CI/CD (Jenkins, GitLab CI) · Git · Linux · self-hosted infrastructure · Agile / Scrum

Experience

Senior Mobile Software Engineer — Dappre BV, Eindhoven, NL

Oct 2018 – present · dappre.com

  • Lead Android and KMP development of Dappre, a privacy-focused consumer app spanning loyalty programs, sportclub programs, and physical-activity tracking (originally an end-to-end encrypted messaging and digital business-card product).
  • Owned the end-to-end migration of the app's legacy Java AsyncTask codebase to Kotlin Coroutines, AndroidX, and Jetpack Compose, modernizing the architecture without halting feature delivery.
  • Set the technical direction for the platform: introduced MongoDB, a microservice split, Docker, and CI/CD practice.
  • The company's point of contact for LLM work: chose the stack and decide where it gets applied.
  • Own four Nuxt / TypeScript applications — content management, CRM, deep links, and the chat agent — including migrating the original Vue 3 (Composition API) CMS to Nuxt.

Delivery Manager, .NET & Mobile portfolio — EPAM Systems, Wrocław, Poland

Aug 2016 – Sep 2018 · epam.com

  • Key .NET developer on the core team of a US-based finance project, while owning delivery for the portfolio.
  • Led the in-house Xamarin mobile app team.
  • Owned delivery across multiple teams: staffing, estimation, client relationship, and delivery quality.

Mobile Team Lead / iOS Developer, then CTO — City Soft LLC, Kazakhstan

Nov 2011 – Aug 2016 · (CTO from Feb 2015) · citysoft.kz

  • Multiple client/server mobile and web applications — server side C# / ASP.NET / Docker, clients in Objective-C (iOS) and Java (Android).
  • As CTO from Feb 2015: owned hiring, technical documentation, project estimation, and engineering process across a company of 20–40 people, heading a department of 12–15, while continuing to ship iOS and server code.

Senior iOS / Windows Phone Developer — TIMWE Group

Nov 2015 – Feb 2016 · concurrent contract alongside City Soft · timwe.com

  • eGov / mGov and OpenDialog apps (iOS, Windows Phone) for the Egov.kz national e-government platform, through which the public obtains government services by mobile.

iOS / Windows Phone / Android Developer — Golden Information Technologies LLC

2013 – 2015 · concurrent contract alongside City Soft · goldenit.kz

  • iOS, Windows Phone, and Android apps for the General Prosecutor's Office and its regional offices, and for the Supreme Court, regional courts, the military court, and all district-level courts of Kazakhstan — news, contacts, and hearing schedules (case number, defendants).

Senior Software Developer / Mobile Team Lead — Dynamics Technologies LLC

Mar 2011 – Nov 2011 · dtech.kz

  • iPad client for the "Evridoc" document-workflow system, built in ~2.5 months and still on the App Store.

Programmer — D-Centralize AB, the Netherlands

Feb 2010 – Aug 2010 · d-centralize.nl

  • Android/Java mobile and Google App Engine/Python web development.

Projects

basqaru — a Kazakh-language media aggregation platform, web and mobile, owned end to end. Astro SSR on Cloudflare Workers with D1 and Queues; scheduled ingestion from Telegram (TDLib), YouTube and RSS, with multi-provider LLM summarisation (OpenAI, Gemini, Anthropic, Workers AI) behind a provider abstraction; decentralised distribution over Nostr and iroh, tunnelled over Tor with the daemon bundled rather than delegated to Orbot — on Android a per-ABI libtor.so behind a foreground service, and on iOS, where side processes are forbidden, Arti (Rust Tor) linked in-process through a from-scratch Kotlin/Native binding to the UniFFI C ABI. KMP/CMP client — Android published on Google Play, iOS in review. basqar.net

Restorator — multi-tenant hospitality SaaS on Cloudflare Workers: a database per tenant (D1) behind shared Postgres, Nuxt/Nitro and Vue 3, with KMP/CMP staff and guest apps. Architecture and build owned end to end. In active development.

Education

Bachelor in ICT (Software Development) — Fontys University of Applied Sciences, Eindhoven, NL (2007–2010)

Languages

English C1 · Dutch A2 · Russian native · Kazakh native