About Ali Arshad

What I do

For over 13 years I have designed, built, and modernized software that businesses rely on every day: enterprise platforms, SaaS products, e-commerce systems, and most recently AI-powered applications. My work spans media, insurance, healthcare, and retail, always with the same goal of software that quietly does its job at scale.

At The Dallas Morning News I helped keep a publishing platform serving roughly four million monthly readers fast and reliable, modernizing a 16-year-old codebase onto containerized AWS infrastructure without interrupting a single day of publishing. Average page load time went from 4.8 seconds to 1.4. Before that, I built the insurance quote and rating platform behind the McDonald’s franchise program, about 13,000 U.S. locations, cutting quote turnaround from two days to under fifteen minutes.

Where I add the most value

• Legacy modernization. Upgrading frameworks, migrating runtimes, and moving systems to containerized cloud deployments, with minimal disruption to the business running on them.
• Full-stack delivery. PHP (Laravel, Symfony), TypeScript, React, Next.js, Vue, and Node.js, backed by MySQL, PostgreSQL, Redis, and AWS.
• AI that earns its keep. I recently built and deployed an LLM-powered lead-response platform with automated classification, AI-generated replies, evaluation controls, and token-cost monitoring. Practical AI, measured like any other system.
• Integrations. Payments, CRMs, ERPs, Epic EHR, identity and SSO. I have connected business systems to more third-party services than I can count.

How I work

I like clear problems, honest estimates, and shipping in small, verifiable steps. I write tested code, I document what I build, and I leave teams stronger than I found them. Mentoring engineers is part of the job, not an extra. If your company has a system that matters and it needs to be faster, more reliable, or simply brought into this decade, that is the work I enjoy most.