Full-stack & AI engineer · Melbourne, Australia
I turn messy information into products people rely on.
I'm Ali Abbas — a full-stack and AI engineer drawn to the whole of a hard problem: the models and retrieval at the core, the data pipelines that feed them, and the product people actually use. I learned it by building and operating Shia Library, a production search platform over a large, multilingual corpus — and I'm building toward AI products that ship at real scale.
- 220
- books ingested
- 35k+
- passages translated
- AR · FA · EN
- languages
- Live
- in production
Selected work
Two halves of one platform
A production library and the pipeline that feeds it — built and operated solo.
Capabilities
What I work on
Grouped by function, not a flat list of keywords.
Languages
- TypeScript
- JavaScript
- Python
- Java
- SQL
Frontend
- React
- Next.js (App Router)
- Tailwind / MUI
- Accessibility
- Performance
Backend & data
- Node.js
- PostgreSQL
- Supabase
- pgvector
- Full-text search
- Row-level security
- Caching
AI & retrieval
- RAG
- Embeddings
- Hybrid & semantic search
- Prompt engineering
- LLM evaluation
- Prompt caching
- Anthropic / OpenAI APIs
Infra & practices
- Vercel
- CI/CD (GitHub Actions)
- Testing (Vitest, Playwright)
- Git
- Security (CSP, secret scanning)
Writing
Notes on the hard parts
18 Apr 2026Making Arabic search actually find thingsWhy a naïve query misses most of its matches in Arabic text, and how diacritic-insensitive search + a client-side mirror fixes it without slowing down.6 min10 Feb 2026A translation pipeline that survives crashesTranslating tens of thousands of passages with an LLM means long, flaky, expensive runs. Here's the checkpointing and quality-gating that makes it safe.5 min
Contact
Let's talk about retrieval, scale, or correctness.
Open to software, AI, and platform engineering internships and graduate roles.