LaunchCrafted
YouTubeWhere I share what I'm building, and the engineering decisions behind it. Mostly on YouTube for now. There's a newsletter too, but it's early days.
Lead engineer · Isle of Man, UK · open to interesting work
Mortaza
Taghizadeh
I've written software for about ten years, backend and infrastructure mostly, with a lot of AI lately. I taught myself, co-founded a company, and now lead engineering at a digital-forensics firm.
Lead Engineer UHY Crossleys Forensics / PhantomStudios
01 Where I've worked
Experience
The full path, from co-founding a startup to the forensics software I build now.
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Lead Engineer, Software & Digital Forensic Analyst Current
UHY Crossleys Forensics / PhantomStudios
I lead the engineering on PhantomTrace and set up most of the firm's marketing.
- PhantomTrace, built end-to-end
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Senior Backend & DevOps Engineer
TheBugNet / UROC Studios
Wrote and ran the .NET / C# services behind a busy platform. Moved us off EC2 / ECS onto Kubernetes (on-prem plus AWS EKS), and set up CI/CD and GitOps.
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Senior Software Engineer, Part-Time
CRAFTAPPLIED
Go backend work on Postgres and Redis: mostly a large file-sharing service, plus auth, rate limiting, and the infrastructure to run it all.
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Co-Founder & Head of Engineering Founder
CONSOLE
Co-founded a mobile gaming-content platform and spent four years growing it from an idea to real usage. I led a small backend and Android team and broke the monolith into services, but also handled the marketing, ran the sprints as scrum master, and sat in the meetings that brought businesses on.
- 150K+ registered users
- 200K+ tutorials & articles
- One of Iran's top apps in its category
Before that, Android and backend jobs at Melodyab, Saman MDF, Samserial, and Dastgire (2016 - 2020).
What I work with
Tools & tech
Languages
- Go
- Java
- SQL
- Python
- C# / .NET
- TypeScript
Backend & APIs
- REST
- gRPC
- Event-driven
- RabbitMQ
- SSO + RBAC
- Observability
AI / LLM
- Claude API
- Agent orchestration
- RAG
- Embeddings
DevOps & cloud
- Kubernetes
- Docker
- Terraform
- Helm
- AWS
- Azure
- CI/CD
Data & storage
- PostgreSQL
- MongoDB
- Redis
- Object storage
OSINT & forensics
- Burp Suite
- Wireshark
- MobSF
- APK RE
- Maltego
02 Things I've built
Projects
All on GitHub Forensics platform Proprietary
PhantomTrace
Finds cloned and copycat apps across 11 app stores by comparing icons and screenshots with perceptual hashing and CLIP/SigLIP embeddings. It checks each hit is still live, pulls its metadata, re-scans on a schedule, and emails me when something new turns up. It's my main project at work.
Python Open source
AWSTUI
A terminal app for managing AWS without leaving the keyboard. I liked LazyDocker and wanted the same thing for AWS.
Go Personal tool
Audio Downloader
A small tool for downloading audiobooks. Nothing clever, just something I needed.
Python Open source Contributor
GORSE
I pitched in on GORSE, an open-source recommender engine in Go, for a while a few years back.
Go 03 On the side
Ventures & content
Two things I keep coming back to outside of work.
◆ Verified
Certifications
About one a year.
04 The person
About
- Self-taught
- Ex-founder
- Build in public
- Loves to travel
I taught myself to code from English resources before I could really speak English. It convinced me you can learn almost anything if you want it badly enough.
I co-founded Console, a gaming-content startup, and ran it for four years. In 2022 I left Iran. It was a deliberate decision, and one of the best I've made. I still think like a founder even with a day job. That's where FounderChapters and LaunchCrafted come from.
I care more about making progress than comparing myself to other people. I try to be honest and keep my word. And I travel whenever I can. That matters to me about as much as the work does.