Aario Shahbany

Aario Shahbany

Backend engineer. Go, PHP, C++, encrypted systems, and production LLM integration.

I have built server software for fifteen years. Lately I build systems where the server stores data it cannot read, because only the people who own the data hold the keys. I am looking for a new team.

Available for
Senior backend engineer roles, remote. A permanent job preferred.
Right to work
German citizen, resident in Spain. No visa or sponsorship needed anywhere in the EU.
Based in
Tenerife, Canary Islands, Spain
Working hours
UTC+0. The whole day overlaps Europe, the mornings overlap the US east coast.

Resume (PDF)

What I have built

Velyora

Velyora is the software a church uses to keep its records: its members, their families, who came to each gathering, and the events people sign up for.

The server keeps every record locked and holds no key that opens it. Nobody running the servers can read a member's name, address or notes. Only the people a church lets in can.

Velyora runs in five languages. A pipeline I built keeps the translations current: when someone edits a page, only the parts that actually changed are sent for translation, and every translation is checked before it goes live.

I designed and built all of it on my own: the server, the website, the locking, and the tests.

For engineers: SRP-6a login, so the password never reaches the server. Per-recipient key wrapping over ECDH. Data keys held separately from the keys that encrypt them. Key rotation that rewrites every record in one go. Recovery from a printed QR code. The translation pipeline tracks a hash per language in sidecar files, so only changed blocks are re-sent. It splits each document into translatable units, masks tokens and links so the model cannot alter them, and batches requests against a character budget. Every returned block is validated: numbers must match the source, glossary terms and forced phrases must be present, link markers must be intact, and heading and paragraph structure must be unchanged. A block that fails is retried, then escalated, then falls back to manual entry.

It runs as a service: Stripe billing from signup to cancellation, data export and deletion under GDPR, many churches on one installation with roles deciding who sees what, five languages, around sixty end-to-end test runs, and a frozen set of tests kept for every database migration.

Built with Go, PostgreSQL, Hugo, Vanilla JavaScript, Docker, LLM API

See it live

Sahara

Sahara is a game about landing on an empty planet and walking it. The engine parts underneath are mine, written in C++ as an extension to Godot.

I wrote the engine code, the shaders and the tools that build the art.

The ground is generated on the graphics card by compute shaders. Mountains, craters and caves are described as signed distance fields and combined. Clouds are drawn as volume rather than as pictures. Inverse kinematics puts the astronaut's feet and hands on the real surface.

What draws me to this work is how far you can push the hardware. Mathematics and a well-chosen algorithm will draw something fabulous on a machine that should not manage it.

Built with C++, GDExtension, GLSL compute shaders, Python

Experience

The line runs from factory electronics, through Linux and operations, into the backends of large online shops, and now into encrypted software.

Certified Kubernetes Administrator, Cloud Native Computing Foundation.

Open source

My publicly available works.

How I work

Every function does one job. Values are named, not buried in the logic. My code reads the same way in every project I have written, so someone else can pick it up.

A feature is not finished until a test proves it. I keep tests that drive the whole system, not only its parts.

Across my career, I have led a team of five, and I have delivered whole products on my own.

I use AI to write code, but nothing reaches a file unless I have read it and approved it. I wrote my own tool to enforce that, so changes arrive small enough to check and the model cannot quietly overwrite already functioning parts of the code.

About me

English fluent. German intermediate. Persian native.

I am a Christian. Velyora started as help for my own church.

My Bible study blog