Osman Ali

I build backend systems that scale.

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I design and run backend systems people rely on daily. I work on payment infrastructure where transactions carry real money and built a university matching engine end to end serving 20,000+ users. I own the full lifecycle from design to production.

Outside of code: football, music, and probably overthinking some distributed system problem at 2am.

Work

Backend Engineer at Tap & Hop

2025 - Present

Digitalizing transit fare collection across Ghana's trotro and taxi networks.

I lead backend engineering for Tap & Hop. I design and maintain the microservices behind payments, trip tracking, passenger manifests, and notifications. The work is centered on moving real money in low-connectivity environments where reliability isn't optional. I build idempotent systems to prevent double charges, handle wallet reconciliation, ensure accurate fare computation, and automate settlement flows.

Founder, My UniPlan

2023 - Present

Student-university matching platform. 20,000+ users. Solo built and still running.

Built a production platform that matches students to eligible university programs based on their grades, providing deterministic “qualify / don't qualify” outcomes. Serving thousands of users over 2.5+ years.
Scraped and transformed unstructured admission requirements into a normalized dataset, then implemented a rule-based matching engine. Designed, built, and operate the full system: Next.js frontend, Django backend, and all hosting/infrastructure.