# Sumaia Aktar - Senior Software Engineer

I write Laravel. Some of it ships inside Laravel - and inside its AI SDK.

Senior software engineer. Seven years of production SaaS in PHP, Laravel and Vue. Contributor to laravel/framework and to laravel/ai, and I run a small fleet of autonomous agents that turn issues into pull requests, review code, and brief me in Slack.

- Location: Dhaka, Bangladesh (UTC+6)
- Status: Open to senior backend, AI-engineering and product roles · remote from UTC+6
- Site: https://sumaia.xyz
- GitHub: https://github.com/sumaiazaman
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sumaia-aktar-57870018a
- Email: saktar50.cse@gmail.com
- CV: https://sumaia.xyz/cv?v=1792403097

## AI engineering

I build with AI, not just alongside it. Three places it shows up: inside Laravel's official AI SDK, in a fleet of agents I run on my own infrastructure, and in the products I ship for other people.

### Inside the SDK
Contributor to laravel/ai, Laravel's official AI SDK. Providers integrated: OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, Mistral, Cohere, DeepSeek, Ollama, xAI, OpenRouter, Azure OpenAI, ElevenLabs, Jina, Voyage AI.

### Agents in production
- Code agent: Turns a GitHub issue into a fixing pull request, reviews PRs with inline comments, and patches bugs reported in Slack.
- AI-news agent: Filters the day's model, tooling and research releases into a short Slack briefing.
- World-news agent: Same pipeline, different sources - a real-time, de-duplicated briefing channel.

Self-hosted on a 4 GB VPS with Docker Compose, alongside LibreChat, Nextcloud, Rocket.Chat, Jitsi, Wekan and Adminer. Stack: Hermes · Slack API · GitHub API · Docker Compose · Linux VPS.

Code-agent pipeline: Issue opened (GitHub webhook → Slack thread) → Agent reads (repo, history, failing test) → Branch + fix (small diff, one concern) → Tests run (red → green or it stops) → PR opened (summary written for a human) → Inline review (second agent, fresh context) → I merge (or I don't).

### Principles
- The agent writes the first draft. I own the diff.
- Every provider fails differently. Design for the failure, not the demo.
- If it cannot be tested, it does not ship - that goes double for generated code.

Daily tools: Claude Code, Cursor, Gemini CLI, ChatGPT, n8n, LibreChat (self-hosted).

## Selected work

### OnBordly (2026 - Present)
Co-founder & engineering lead · multi-tenant HRM SaaS. https://onbordly.xyz
- Took the product from an empty repository to eight shipped modules - employee records, leave, attendance, onboarding, RBAC, audit logging and admin analytics.
- Tiered subscription billing with Laravel Cashier, entitlements gated through Laravel Pennant so plan limits live in one place rather than scattered across controllers.
- Per-company tenancy through Jetstream Teams over a service/repository layer, so isolation is enforced by the framework rather than by remembering to scope a query.
Stack: Laravel 10 · Vue 3 · Inertia.js · MySQL · Redis · AWS S3 · PHPUnit.
Case study: https://sumaia.xyz/work/onbordly.md

### AI Apply - easy.jobs (2021 - 2026)
Conversational application engine · GDPR-compliant recruitment SaaS. https://app.easy.jobs
- Replaced a multi-step application form with a chat flow covering personal details, education, employment, documents, video, screening questions and quiz.
- Resume auto-parsing to pre-fill fields, session persistence so an incomplete application survives a reload, and input validation at entry to block injection.
- Found and fixed a production bug where the entire notification pipeline failed silently - applications saved, employers never told, nothing in any log.
Stack: Laravel · PHP · Vanilla JS · MySQL · Redis · REST APIs.
Case study: https://sumaia.xyz/work/ai-apply.md

### Provider gateways - laravel/ai (2026 - Present)
Contributor · Laravel's official AI SDK. https://github.com/laravel/ai
- Hardened integrations across thirteen LLM providers that each fail differently and each describe those failures differently.
- Failover error handling across gateways, correct model resolution through a failover chain, and a typed InsufficientCreditsException so running out of credit stops being an anonymous 4xx.
- Normalised usage accounting across OpenAI-shaped providers, and made a dead stream broadcast a failure instead of hanging.
Stack: PHP 8 · Pest · OpenAI · Gemini · Mistral · Cohere · Ollama · xAI · DeepSeek.
Case study: https://sumaia.xyz/work/laravel-ai.md

### GEEKY AIQ (2026)
Answer-engine optimisation platform. https://growthcrm.devcoreio.com
- Measures how visible a brand is across AI assistants - prompt tracking, citation share and competitor comparison on a schedule.
- Built on the same provider-integration patterns as the SDK work above, which is what made the multi-model scanning tractable.
Stack: Laravel · Vue.js · MySQL · Redis · OpenAI · Tailwind.
Case study: https://sumaia.xyz/work/geeky-aiq.md

## Open source

- laravel/framework: 60 merged pull requests - Queues · Cache · Validation - https://github.com/laravel/framework/pulls?q=is%3Apr+author%3Asumaiazaman+is%3Amerged
- laravel/ai: 37 merged pull requests - Provider gateways · Failover - https://github.com/laravel/ai/pulls?q=is%3Apr+author%3Asumaiazaman+is%3Amerged
- Laravel 13 release contributor (https://github.com/laravel/framework/releases/tag/v13.0.0). Full list: https://sumaia.xyz/contributions.md

## Packages

- laravel-sqs-redrive - Native AWS SQS dead-letter-queue support. Detects redrive policies automatically and lets SQS route failed jobs instead of deleting the message. - `composer require sumaiazaman/laravel-sqs-redrive` - https://packagist.org/packages/sumaiazaman/laravel-sqs-redrive
- laravel-acronym-pluralizer - Fixes Laravel's pluralizer for uppercase acronyms - Str::plural('CD') returns CDs, not CDS. Drop-in, no config. - `composer require sumaiazaman/laravel-acronym-pluralizer` - https://packagist.org/packages/sumaiazaman/laravel-acronym-pluralizer
- laravel-stringable-extras - Adds the missing whenDoesntContain() and whenDoesntContainAll() methods, completing Stringable's fluent conditional API. - `composer require sumaiazaman/laravel-stringable-extras` - https://packagist.org/packages/sumaiazaman/laravel-stringable-extras
- google-onetap-login - Google One-Tap sign-in for Laravel, with automatic user registration and minimal setup. - `composer require sumaia/google-onetap-login` - https://packagist.org/packages/sumaia/google-onetap-login
- @sumaiaaktar/stripe-payment - Stripe payment UI components for React and Next.js, built on Stripe Elements. TypeScript, ESM and CJS builds. - `npm i @sumaiaaktar/stripe-payment` - https://www.npmjs.com/package/@sumaiaaktar/stripe-payment

## Notes

- Thirteen providers, thirteen ways to fail (2026-06-10): What thirty-seven merged pull requests into laravel/ai taught me about the difference between an integration that demos and one that ships. - https://sumaia.xyz/notes/thirteen-providers-thirteen-ways-to-fail.md
- Getting a pull request merged into laravel/framework (2026-04-28): Thirty-seven merged pull requests later, the practical things I wish someone had told me before the first one. - https://sumaia.xyz/notes/getting-a-pull-request-into-laravel.md
- The bug that failed silently (2026-02-14): A production notification pipeline stopped working without a single error. What that taught me about side effects, and why I later wrote a package about dead-letter queues. - https://sumaia.xyz/notes/the-bug-that-failed-silently.md

## Skills

- Backend: PHP 8, Laravel, Eloquent, Queues & Horizon, REST APIs, MySQL, Redis, PHPUnit / Pest, Laravel Dusk
- Frontend: Vue 3, Inertia.js, JavaScript / TypeScript, React & Next.js, Tailwind CSS, Blade
- AI: laravel/ai, LLM provider integration & failover, Agent development, Prompt engineering, Self-hosted LLM infra, n8n automation
- Platform: Docker, NGINX, AWS (EC2, S3, RDS, SQS), GCP, DigitalOcean / Hetzner, GitHub Actions, Zero-downtime deploys
- Product: Multi-tenancy, RBAC, Subscription billing (Cashier), Feature flags (Pennant), Stripe / PayPal / bKash / SSLCommerz

## Experience

- Feb 2026 – Present - Co-founder & engineering lead, OnBordly (Remote · Dhaka)
- May 2021 – Feb 2026 - Software Developer, WPDeveloper (easy.jobs) (Dhaka)
- Feb 2019 – May 2021 - Software Developer, Geeky Social Ltd. (Dhaka)

## Education

- BSc (Hons) in Computer Science and Engineering, United International University, 2013 – 2018

## Also shipped

- SMEVai (Laravel, Vue.js) - https://app.smevai.com
- First AID AMC (Laravel, MySQL) - https://firstaidamc.com
- Living Colors Studio (Laravel, jQuery) - https://livingcolors.studio/
- QuickOrder (Laravel, jQuery) - https://order.livingcolors.studio/
- BanglaPress24 (Laravel, jQuery) - https://en.banglapress24.com/
- ShopSphere (Laravel, Stripe) - https://shopsphere.devcoreio.com
- Learnify (Laravel, Vue.js) - https://learnify.devcoreio.com
- NewsSphere (Laravel, Vue.js) - https://newssphere.devcoreio.com
- Smart Inventory POS (Laravel, Vue.js) - https://pos.devcoreio.com
- BookPro (Laravel, Redis) - https://booking.devcoreio.com
- Sangeet Academy (Laravel, Vue.js) - https://sangeetacademy.devcoreio.com