KaraBala
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Software & Full-Stack EngineerDamascus → remote

Mohammad KaraBala

Software that holds up in production.

I build full-stack products end to end — Python backends, React and TypeScript front ends, the APIs between them, and the Docker and Linux infrastructure underneath — then keep them running.

Mohammad KaraBala in a dim office, code on the monitor behind him
Fig. 01KaraBala, M.Damascus, Syria
Availability
Open to work · Full-time (remote) & Freelance & contract
Experience
5 years shipping
Projects
16 projects documented
Local time
--:-- UTC+3
Work

Selected work

Five systems I would put in front of anyone, each drawn as the architecture it actually is, and a ledger of the rest.

DATA FLOW6 STAGESIG / TikTokGo fetcherFastAPIWhisperGeminiAnalysis

01AI · Video intelligence2026 —

Marsad

Short-video intelligence for Instagram & TikTok

A platform that follows public Instagram and TikTok accounts, pulls their clips and turns each one into an Arabic analysis: summary, hook, timestamped verbatim script, on-screen text and call to action.

Problem
Competitors' reels were being watched by hand, and the conclusions lived in someone's memory. Understanding what makes a clip work had to become searchable data instead.
Built
  • FastAPI backend with a Go fetcher service and a TikTok scraper CLI behind it, fetching public pages over residential proxies
  • Gemini for what the video shows, Whisper for what it says, and OpenAI for the Arabic narrative and structured hook, script and CTA extraction
  • A job queue that runs analyses one at a time and streams progress to every teammate's browser, reattaching after a reload
  • Bilingual Next.js interface with URL-driven filters, shared team state and a grounded question-and-answer thread per clip
Impact
Analyses are computed once and shared, so the pipeline watches the clips instead of the team.
Role
Architecture, backend, frontend
  • FastAPI
  • Go
  • Next.js
  • TypeScript
  • Gemini
  • Whisper
  • OpenAI
  • SQLite
DATA FLOW4 STAGESReferralDRF APIOrdersWeb & app

02Full-stack · Mobile2026

Hawees

Affiliate commerce, on the web and on Android

A multi-role commerce platform connecting merchants, marketers and customers through referral links, with commissions attributed and distributed automatically.

Problem
Merchants wanted marketers selling for them, but tracking who drove which order — and paying for it without an argument — was entirely manual.
Built
  • Django REST Framework APIs covering products, orders, wallets, reviews and referral attribution
  • Automated commission distribution tied to the referral link that produced the sale
  • Next.js storefront in TypeScript, built around the three roles it serves
  • Kotlin and Jetpack Compose Android client with push notifications
Role
Backend, web front end, Android client
  • Django REST Framework
  • Next.js
  • TypeScript
  • Kotlin
  • Jetpack Compose
  • Docker
DATA FLOW6 STAGESTikTokDownloadScenesOCRBrandS3 + API

03Automation · Media2026 —

Keyboardy

Arabic short-video curation, unattended

A pipeline that finds trending Arabic clips country by country, cuts them into scenes, reads what is in each scene, brands the survivors and publishes them.

Problem
Curating regional short video by hand stops scaling after a few clips a day, and the material worth keeping is scattered across countries and platforms.
Built
  • Playwright scrapers for TikTok explore, search and the official Creative Center trends, per country
  • yt-dlp downloads, scene splitting with per-scene keywords, and on-screen text read by OCR
  • Transcript and summary analysis, theme matching, watermarking and AV1 and WhatsApp re-encoding with FFmpeg
  • Publishing to Amazon S3 and a collector API, triggered by n8n webhooks on a daily schedule
Impact
A day of curation runs without supervision and lands as finished, branded clips.
Role
Design & engineering, end to end
  • Python
  • Playwright
  • yt-dlp
  • FFmpeg
  • EasyOCR
  • Amazon S3
  • n8n
DATA FLOW4 STAGESCommentsWebhookFastAPIReply & DM

04SaaS · Automation2026

Instagram Engagement Suite

Comment automation for Instagram Business accounts

A multi-account SaaS that watches Instagram comments as they arrive, replies automatically, follows up in direct messages, and reports on the engagement it handled.

Problem
Accounts with real engagement drown in comments, and the replies that matter most are the ones that arrive first.
Built
  • FastAPI backend on the Instagram Graph API with Facebook OAuth and webhook-driven comment ingestion
  • Auto-reply with follow-up direct messages, alongside manual replies from the dashboard
  • Next.js dashboard in Arabic and English with engagement charts, comment classification and light and dark themes
  • Subscription redeem codes, per-account n8n webhooks and signed sessions with expiry handling
Role
Backend, frontend, integrations
  • FastAPI
  • Next.js
  • TypeScript
  • Tailwind CSS
  • Instagram Graph API
  • SQLite
DATA FLOW4 STAGESSourcesScraperFastAPIBot / API

05Backend · Scraping2023

SP Today API

Real-time currency & gold price service

A backend service that continuously collects live currency and gold prices and serves them as a structured API, plus a Telegram bot on top of it.

Problem
Prices lived on pages that change shape without notice. The service had to keep collecting reliably and answer fast, even while sources misbehaved.
Built
  • Resilient scraping pipeline with structured, validated responses
  • FastAPI service tuned for fast, continuous delivery
  • n8n automations for scheduling and notifications
  • Telegram bot as a consumer of the same API
Role
Design & engineering
  • Python
  • FastAPI
  • Web scraping
  • n8n
  • Telegram API

More work

  1. 06

    AI Content Automation Pipeline

    Social media publishing with zero manual steps

    An end-to-end system that generates, formats and schedules text and video content, then publishes it across Telegram and social platforms without a human in the loop.

    n8n · Python · LLM APIs · Webhooks · Telegram API · Docker

  2. 07

    Sayar

    AI-powered Arabic pronunciation coaching

    A bilingual learning platform that records a learner reading Arabic, analyses the recording with Whisper and returns feedback, with progress tracked over time.

    Django REST Framework · React · Whisper · Celery · Redis · MySQL · Docker

  3. 08

    Medo Freight

    International freight management platform

    A freight platform for creating shipments, pricing them and generating the shipping labels and signature documents each route requires.

    Django · Next.js · PostgreSQL · Docker · Nginx

  4. 09

    Operation & Maintenance Portal

    Internal file operations, tagged and audited

    An internal portal for searching, uploading, downloading, tagging and auditing operational files, with access controls and reporting on top.

    Django · React · MySQL · Keycloak · Docker

  5. 10

    Employee Recognition Platform

    Nominations, approvals and verifiable certificates

    A nomination system where colleagues recognise each other, approvals move through a defined workflow, and recipients get a certificate that can be verified.

    Django REST Framework · React · Google OAuth · MariaDB · Docker

  6. 11

    Full-Stack List Manager

    Internal data management system

    A production web application for managing and tracking structured data workflows, with secure file handling and fully automated server provisioning.

    Django · React · PostgreSQL · Docker · Ansible

  7. 12

    Live Wallpapers Automation

    Pinterest media harvester in Go

    A Go command-line tool that searches Pinterest, resolves the highest-resolution image behind each pin and downloads the results through a worker pool.

    Go · Concurrency · HTTP scraping

  8. 13

    Chatbang Pro

    Terminal client for ChatGPT

    An open-source terminal client extended with DOM-based response extraction, Unicode and right-to-left support, browser detection and custom GPT support.

    Go · chromedp · Chromium automation

  9. 14

    CV Mailer

    Automated job application system

    Sends personalised application emails with CV attachments at scale, with dynamic generation, scheduling and delivery tracking.

    Python · SMTP · Automation

  10. 15

    FMEE Results Bot

    University exam results, in Telegram, in Arabic

    A Telegram bot that retrieves and presents university exam results in real time — marks, averages and missing subjects — with specialization detection.

    Python · Web scraping · Telegram API

  11. 16

    Syria Location Database

    Administrative divisions as clean, queryable data

    Extracts Syria's governorates, cities, districts and towns from text files into MySQL and CSV, de-duplicated, bilingual and ready to query.

    Python · MySQL · CSV

Capabilities

Where I'm strongest

Four areas of depth and the tools inside each. The weight is honest: solid means daily use, plain means productive, dashed means I'm learning it right now.

Core Working Exploring

01

Backend & APIs

Python services that scale and stay up.

REST APIs, relational schemas designed around integrity, background jobs and integrations with third-party systems. Django when the product needs batteries, FastAPI when it needs speed.

  • Python (core)
  • Go (working)
  • Django (core)
  • FastAPI (working)
  • Flask (working)
  • REST API design (core)
  • PostgreSQL (core)
  • MySQL (working)
  • MongoDB (working)
  • SQL (core)
02

Frontend & product

Interfaces people actually use.

Component-driven React applications with TypeScript, responsive and accessible by default, including bilingual Arabic/English products with right-to-left layouts.

  • React (core)
  • TypeScript (working)
  • JavaScript (core)
  • Next.js (core)
  • HTML & CSS (core)
  • Responsive & RTL UI (core)
  • Accessibility (working)
03

DevOps & infrastructure

Repeatable deployments, monitored.

Containerised services on Linux, provisioned with Ansible, shipped through CI, and kept healthy with automated monitoring and maintenance.

  • Docker (core)
  • Linux servers (core)
  • Ansible (core)
  • CI/CD (working)
  • Bash (working)
  • Git (core)
  • Amazon S3 (working)
  • Monitoring (working)
04

Automation & AI integration

Workflows and models wired into real products.

n8n orchestration, resilient scraping pipelines and LLM stages with the retries, validation and observability that turn a demo into a service.

  • n8n (core)
  • Web scraping (core)
  • Playwright (core)
  • Scrapy (working)
  • LLM APIs (Claude, GPT) (core)
  • Gemini & Whisper (working)
  • LangChain (working)
  • LangGraph (exploring)
  • Ollama (exploring)

Currently exploring

  • Next.js App Router and server components
  • Agentic workflows with LangGraph
  • Running local models with Ollama

Languages

  • Arabic — Native
  • English — Professional
Track record

Track record

Where the work has happened: one full-time role and two freelance engagements running in parallel since 2022, on top of an engineering degree.

  1. Jan 2024 — Present3 yrsFull-time

    Software Engineer — Python & DevOps

    BeinMedia · Kuwait · remote

    • Built and maintain scalable scraping pipelines running from virtual mobile environments under constantly changing conditions.
    • Develop and deploy backend services on Linux servers with Docker and CI workflows.
    • Designed n8n automation systems for AI-driven content generation and social media publishing.
    • Automated deployments, monitoring and maintenance — fewer manual steps, fewer errors.
  2. Dec 2022 — Present4 yrsFreelance

    Software Engineer

    Cellusys · London, UK · remote

    • Delivered full-stack web applications with Django, React and Docker for international clients.
    • Built scalable backend systems, APIs and automation tools tailored to business needs.
    • Worked directly with clients from requirements through production delivery.
  3. Sep 2022 — Present5 yrsFreelance

    Software Engineer

    Independent clients · Middle East · remote

    • Custom web and automation solutions for e-commerce, FinTech and internal platforms.
    • Multilingual (Arabic/English) systems with third-party integrations and cloud deployment.
    • Performance, reliability and scalable architecture as the default, not the upgrade.
Approach

How I work

Four rules that show up in every system above. They are less about tools than about what happens after launch.

  1. Production is the spec

    A pipeline that works once is a prototype. I design for the second week: retries, validation, logs you can actually read, and alerts before users notice.

  2. Automate the boring, watch the rest

    If a human repeats it, a machine should do it — and a dashboard should prove it did. Deployments, monitoring and cleanup are automated by default.

  3. Boring infrastructure, interesting products

    Docker, Linux, Postgres, plain HTTP. Well-understood tools leave the budget for the parts that are genuinely new, like the AI stages.

  4. Build for the people who use it

    Arabic-first interfaces, fast responses, no dead ends. Good engineering is measured at the point where someone relies on it.

Contact

Let's build something that runs.

Open to full-time remote roles and freelance work. Write to me directly — there is no form, every message lands with me.

Mohammad KaraBala

Damascus, Syria · --:-- UTC+3

Designed and built by hand. React 18, TypeScript, Vite, CSS custom properties and a hand-written WebGL lattice — no UI framework, no animation library, no 3D engine.

Last deployed 2026-09-17 · © 2026