Ali Rzayev

Frontend Team Lead

Baku, Azerbaijan

Summary

Frontend Team Lead with 8+ years of experience building products from zero to production and scaling teams to maintain them. Led cross-functional teams of up to 5 engineers, shipped SaaS products from MVP to market, and drove large-scale legacy-to-modern refactors serving 13,000+ customers. Hands-on technical leader who pairs roadmap ownership with deep frontend expertise.

Experience

Clopos · Baku, Azerbaijan

Jul 2024 — Present

Team Lead | Frontend Developer

Nov 2024 — Present

Collaborated with CTO and CPO to define product roadmap and led the frontend team in executing it across 6 products - POS system, admin dashboard, QR menu, payment gateway, partner portal, and marketing website
Managed senior and mid-level developers - code reviews, deployments, task delegation, and sprint planning

Senior Front-end Developer

Jul 2024 — Nov 2024

Eliminated all legacy bug tickets and reduced incoming bug reports to near-zero while the customer base continued to scale
Drove resolution of accumulated tech debt, stabilizing the product suite for a growing active user base

FS Poster · Baku, Azerbaijan

Jul 2023 — Jul 2024

Team Lead | Senior Software Engineer

Led full refactor of a WordPress plugin serving 13,000+ customers from legacy jQuery/MVC/PHP to React, Vite, Module SCSS, and REST API architecture
Built a plugin extension system from scratch, enabling modular feature development and third-party integrations with 20+ APIs
Created custom rich text editor plugins for functionality not available in existing libraries
Shipped the refactored product to production in 4-5 months while maintaining the legacy version in parallel
Mentored 1 junior and 2 mid-level engineers through code reviews, documentation standards, and Git branching strategy

FS Code · Baku, Azerbaijan

May 2020 — Jul 2023

Team Lead | Full-stack Developer

May 2021 — Jul 2023

Built Planly - a social media automation SaaS - from concept to production: assembled a team of 4 engineers (1 senior, 3 mid), co-owned the product roadmap with PO, and shipped a production-ready MVP in under 5 months
Chose and implemented the technical architecture for Planly: React with modular CSS on the frontend, C# and Go on the backend
Led both frontend and backend teams, performing code reviews across 2+ languages and managing deployments for 13,000+ plugin customers

Full-stack Developer

May 2020 — May 2021

Built custom ORM, Query Builder, and deployment pipeline for the FS Poster WordPress plugin, ensuring compatibility across diverse server configurations
Containerized build processes and managed releases to a customer base of 13,000+

Planly · Baku, Azerbaijan

Apr 2022 — Dec 2022

Technical Project Manager

Managed collaboration between Product Owner and engineering team, translating product requirements into technical tasks
Planned sprints, authored and maintained documentation on Wiki/Confluence, and resolved cross-team blockers
Mentored junior and mid-level developers on engineering best practices
Automated deployment pipelines using GitLab CI, reducing manual release overhead

Freelance / Upwork · Remote

Jan 2017 — May 2020

Full-stack Developer

Built e-commerce platforms with product scraping from Trendyol, Amazon, and AliExpress
Delivered full-stack solutions using PHP, Python, Node.js on the backend and JavaScript/React on the frontend

Side Projects

Frankenstein

Internal AI-powered development cycle automation tool at Clopos

Built an AI agent pipeline that reads Jira tasks, researches requirements, clarifies specs, generates implementation, and creates PRs for human review
Architected the backend with Node.js, Fastify, Redis, and BullMQ to handle webhooks and orchestrate async agent workflows
Deployed and maintained on Hetzner infrastructure

iOS Mobile App

AI-powered iOS app with 3,000+ monthly active users

Built with React Native/Expo, Firebase, Cloudflare R2, and Docker-based serverless AI inference
Designed and implemented custom UI component library from scratch
Created and open-sourced expo-keychain (npmjs.com/package/expo-keychain) - Expo module for iOS Keychain integration

Skills

Frontend React, Next.js, TypeScript, JavaScript, Tailwind, Redux, Zustand, MobX, CSS/SCSS, HTML

Backend PHP, Node.js, Go, C#, REST API, MySQL, PostgreSQL

Tools Vite, Cypress, Git, Docker, CI/CD, GitLab CI, Jira, Linux

Other React Native/Expo, WordPress, Zod/Yup, SVN, AI Tools

Leadership Team Management, Roadmap Planning, Code Review, Mentorship, Sprint Planning, Technical Documentation

Education

Physics Teacher

Azerbaijan State Pedagogical University

Paused to focus on software engineering career

Sep 2019 — May 2023

Languages

Azerbaijani — Native English — Professional Turkish — Limited