Faizan Tahir

CTO and AI architect — 16 years across the GCC and South Asia in AI infrastructure, enterprise architecture, and technology leadership. Currently CTO of a Dubai-based AI HRTech venture. Architected and shipped the platform end-to-end on AWS: candidate assessment, screening, role-fit evaluation, hiring intelligence. Built the entire AI infrastructure in-region — self-hosted LLM inference, voice transcription, video encoding, computer-vision biometric redaction, PII detection, CV parsing, all on EC2 GPU. No external LLM API in the data path. Full data residency. Underneath it, an AI-first engineering framework: all LLM traffic through one self-hosted gateway, per-feature cost/token observability, automatic fallbacks, append-only audit logging, risk-tiered automation — built and run by a six-person team in Karachi, remote from Dubai. Before AI, seven years building custom ERP/MES/MRP-II for apparel and textile manufacturing in Bangladesh: rose to enterprise architect, led the group-wide digitization of an 8,000-employee manufacturer with 1,000+ daily users, reporting to the board. Earlier, six years as a pre-sales solutions architect in Dubai across manufacturing, retail, hospitality, and business services. AWS Certified Solutions Architect. Dubai-based. Open to senior AI architecture and engineering leadership roles across the GCC, UK, and EU.