The person who scopes it, writes it
No handoff from the engineer you liked to a team you have not met. If we quote it, we build it.
About Us
A small team that has run this before
We are engineers who spent a decade inside product teams before starting an agency — which is why we build like people who will still be around when the pager goes off.
Our story
Started by an engineer, not a salesperson
Zaviya Labs grew out of ten years of contract and in-house work by Junaid Farooq, a lead engineer who has shipped Elixir and Rails systems for product teams in the US, Europe, and Africa — recruiting platforms, video infrastructure, healthcare software, fintech, and ride-hailing.
The pattern across all of them was the same. The hard part was never the framework. It was the integration that silently stopped syncing, the queue that stopped draining, the service that got 200ms slower every quarter until nobody remembered it had ever been fast.
So that is what we sell. Not "digital transformation" — the specific, unglamorous backend work that most teams cannot hire for and cannot afford to keep ignoring.
Core stack
Elixir Phoenix 
Ruby on Rails 
Node.js 
TypeScript 
PostgreSQL Also comfortable with
GraphQL 
Python 
React 
Docker 
PHP Remote
Working US mornings, EU afternoons
Senior only
No juniors billed at senior rates
How we think
Four things we actually believe
Every agency says it values quality. These are the specific commitments you can hold us to.
Measure before you change anything
Most performance work fails because the fix was chosen before the cause was found. We find it first, and we show you the evidence.
Boring infrastructure is a feature
We pick the technology your team can still operate in two years, not the one that would look best in a conference talk.
Leave it better documented than we found it
Every engagement ends with tests, notes, and a walkthrough. You should be able to fire us without consequence.
What we cover
Depth where it matters, range where it helps
Backend engineering is the centre of what we do. Everything below supports shipping it properly.
Elixir & OTP
Phoenix, LiveView, GenServers, supervision trees, and the concurrency model underneath them.
Ruby on Rails
Mature Rails codebases: upgrades, performance, Sidekiq, and untangling years of accumulated debt.
Node.js & TypeScript
Services and APIs where the ecosystem fit matters more than raw concurrency.
API Design
REST and GraphQL contracts built to be versioned, documented, and depended on.
PostgreSQL
Schema design, query plans, indexing, and the migrations that run safely on a live table.
Data Pipelines
High-volume background work with Oban and Broadway: retries, idempotency, and backpressure.
DevOps & Infra
Docker, CI/CD, Terraform, and deployments that are boring on purpose.
QA & Testing
Test suites fast enough that people actually run them, plus CI that blocks the right things.
AI & Agents
LLM agents with tool use, retrieval, evaluation, and a budget ceiling.
Frontend
React and Vue where the interface is part of the product, not the whole pitch.
Want to work with us?
We take on a limited number of engagements at a time, which is the only way the "senior engineers only" promise stays true.