Freeoui

The brief

I joined as Tech Lead with a dual mandate that most companies split across three people: grow and guide a five-person engineering team, own how the platform is built and shipped, and stay accountable when production misbehaves. Architecture, delivery, security posture, monitoring, incident response — all in one loop. This is not a “architecture review on Fridays” role. If the platform is down, I am in the room. If a partner asks whether we can integrate with their stack by next sprint, I am the one who says yes, no, or here is the honest timeline.

What I built

I designed and shipped the Laravel backend that powers the product — the domain model, the APIs, the parts partners actually depend on. Then I wrapped delivery in a pipeline the team can trust: build, test, release, without the ritual of “who has SSH access tonight?” Releases stopped being heroic evenings and became a habit. On top of that I set the technical north star: how we structure services, how we handle secrets, how we observe production, and how we recover when something inevitably breaks. The goal was simple — a platform that can take commercial pressure without melting.

Working with real partners

A large share of the leverage is external. I lead the technical side of integrations with major Tunisian partners — Kashy, BIAT, MyTT, Up Tunisie among them — and talk directly with enterprise clients. That means translating product ambition into integration contracts, spotting risk early (auth, callbacks, idempotency, environments), and closing loops without hiding behind a project manager. For Freeoui, that credibility is as valuable as the code: partners move faster when they trust the person on the other end of the call.

What improved

The team ships against a clearer architecture instead of negotiating every decision from scratch. Production delivery is owned, documented in practice if not in a binder, and no longer depends on one person’s laptop. Partner integrations have a single technical counterpart who can negotiate scope and still care about uptime. Commercially, that shows up as shorter sales-to-integration cycles and fewer “we will get back to you” dead ends. Operationally, it shows up as fewer surprises after dark.

What improved

• Production infrastructure and release process owned end to end — not orphaned between “dev” and “ops”
• Laravel backend architecture and delivery consolidated in-house with a pipeline the team can run without heroics
• Direct technical relationships with banks and payment partners — shorter feedback loops, clearer scope
• A five-person team with fewer blocking decisions and a shared picture of how the platform should evolve
• Incident handling with a named owner: faster diagnosis, calmer postmortems, less finger-pointing

Tools in play

Laravel · PHP · Docker · CI/CD · Linux · Nginx · monitoring · partner APIs