01
Software engineering
Full-stack product work for startups. From a backend slice of your roadmap to end-to-end ownership of a product, built from scratch and shipped to users.
Let's talkSalim Consulting · Est. 2022
Production software, shipped. By a London engineer.
I'm Umar Salim. I build production backends and full-stack systems for startups, bring AI into real business operations, and write smart contracts for web3 teams.
Working in
- TypeScript
- React
- Node
- Solidity
- MongoDB
- Python
- AWS
AI models
- OpenAI GPT
- Claude
- Gemini
- Kimi
- DeepSeek
- Qwen
Past engagements
- Moai Labs
- Blockzero Labs
- Visa Europe
- Kavanagh Motor Group
About
Engineer first. Generalist by design.
I'm Umar Salim, a London-based software engineer. I've been building production systems since 2014, while I was still at university: web apps, automations that replace manual work, and smart contracts that move real money. Salim Consulting is the practice I run from that experience.
Most weeks I'm deep in a long-running engagement with Moai Labs, a crypto startup backed by Jason Choi, Arthur Hayes, and 25+ angel investors. Salim Consulting takes on teams adding AI to real operations, and startups that want a senior backend engineer, or one who'll ship the whole thing end to end. I'd rather iterate on something real than plan something perfect.
Services
What I do.
Three overlapping tracks. Pick the closest, or get in touch and we'll figure it out together.
02
AI integration & automation
Audit what can be automated, then wire AI into the tools you already use. Reply drafts, internal search, CRM-signal lead scoring, invoice exception flagging — real, working pieces in days, not months.
Let's talk03
Advisory & consulting
Judgement without commit access. Fractional-CTO time for early-stage startups, independent architecture or smart-contract reviews, tech due diligence before a funding round, or a second opinion on a build quote before you sign anything.
Let's talkSelected work
Things I've shipped.
A decade of shipped work, from a first engineering job through enterprise security to the current crypto lane.
2023 to present · Moai Labs
Upside
Ongoing engineering lead on Upside, Moai's flagship onchain product.
Smart contracts, full-stack builds, and the audit cycles around them. Moai is backed by Jason Choi, Arthur Hayes, and 25+ angel investors. Audited on Code4rena in May 2025 , zero High and zero Medium findings.
2020 to 2023 · Blockzero Labs
Flashstake
Upfront-yield DeFi protocol: lock a yield-bearing asset, receive the full future yield instantly.
Shipped v1, v2, and v3 across Mainnet, Arbitrum, and Optimism, with strategy adapters for Lido, AAVE, RocketPool, GMX, Beefy, Convex, Aura, and Uniswap v3. Audited by PeckShield and Secure3, backed by an Aave grant, and featured as a case study in Uniswap Foundation proposal 47 .
2019 to 2021 · Visa Europe
Cyber Security
Two years on Visa Europe's identity and access management platform.
Dev lead on a Privileged Access Management rollout, built a distributed reporting system comparing accounts and entitlements across Visa's global and regional platforms, and ran emergency onboardings of Tier-1 banks in late 2019.
Co-led the IAM and PAM migration off Broadcom and onto AWS, replacing the incumbent enterprise stack with a cloud-native platform.
2014 to 2016 · First engineering role
Kavanagh Motor Group
Joined the Croydon vehicle-recovery operator as a call handler, noticed the team was spending about eight hours a day categorising and reformatting incoming jobs from the Apex dispatch system, and wrote a Java integration that did it automatically. Also coded the custom bits of their customer-facing site, including a postcode-to-postcode recovery quote wizard with live traffic data. No competitor offered anything like it at the time.
Where the automation work started for me, years before AI was the obvious tool for the job. Same instinct drives the AI integration work today, just with a better toolkit.
Contact
Let's talk.
Tell me about what you're working on and I'll reply within a working day.