Co-Head of Engineering at Bykea — scaled to 10M+ users, 500+ releases, 99.8% uptime. Here's how I think, decide, and build.
I'm Muhammad Mujtaba — engineering leader, quality systems architect, and AI advocate based in Karachi. I've spent 7+ years building the engineering culture and platform that powers Pakistan's largest ride-hailing super-app.
I don't just ship features — I build the systems, processes, and teams that make shipping reliably possible at scale.
Read my career journeyAs Bykea scaled engineering from 10 to 25+ engineers, the traditional functional team structure (separate dev, QA, backend, mobile teams) was creating handoff problems, slow delivery, and accountability gaps. Features required coordination across 4+ team leads before shipping.
Bykea's QA team was the last line of defense before every release. Engineers threw code over the wall, QA found bugs, devs fixed them, repeat. This model was creating slow releases, adversarial dev/QA dynamics, and a culture where quality was QA's problem — not the whole team's.
"Mujtaba is one of the few engineers who genuinely understands both the technical and product side. He'd come to epic reviews having already thought through the edge cases we hadn't. Our launches got dramatically smoother when he moved into the lead role."
"Working under Mujtaba changed how I think about quality. He didn't just teach us tools — he taught us why testing matters. The ISTQB push, the automation culture he built, the way he ran retros — it made me a better engineer."
How to scale quality without scaling headcount · When automation earns trust vs when it destroys it · Building cross-functional squad cultures in fast-moving startups · Making AI a genuine force multiplier for engineering teams · Shifting QA from a bottleneck to an embedded capability · Release management at 1.5M monthly transactions · Mentoring engineers from IC to lead track · Designing systems that stay observable under load
Whether you're scaling an engineering team, rethinking your quality strategy, or looking for AI-forward engineering leadership — I'd love to talk.