About
Hi — I’m Abdul Qabiz, based in Kanpur, India.
I’m a self-taught programmer with 20+ years of building things on the internet. I started before RSS was cool, before the iPhone existed, and before “the cloud” was a thing people said in meetings. I’m still here, still building.
What I’m working on now
I lead GenAI at FreePixel — designing multimodal pipelines, LLaMA-based RAG systems, and automated metadata workflows that process millions of creative assets at scale. The problem I’m solving: making enormous libraries of digital content actually discoverable and usable for a global audience of creative professionals.
I’m also co-founder and CTO of Allies Interactive, where we build our own products and co-build with startups. We’re not a dev shop — we partner with founders who need a technical brain from day one, sharing the risk and the vision.
One of those products is Diziana — a Zendesk Guide platform for Help Center themes and customization. We’ve shipped for Cloudflare, Figma, the Gates Foundation, Cornell University, Tripadvisor, and HelloFresh, among hundreds of others.
How I got here
- Tata Interactive Systems — Lead Flash developer building eLearning apps, simulations, and games. Projects included an ICT Simulation tool for BECTA (UK government agency for educational technology).
- Macromedia/Adobe — Among the first 15 engineers at Macromedia Bangalore. Worked on Flex SDK across two releases (1.5 and 2.0). Dream job for any Flash developer at the time.
- Yahoo! — Platform APIs and Yahoo! Avatars. Worked alongside some of the best engineers I’ve encountered. Shaped how I think about scale.
- Mixercast — Senior Architect at an early Indian tech startup. Built the RIA architecture, syndication engine (RSS/MediaRSS), and Mixercast Player from scratch.
- IndieReign / Shift72 — CTO. End-to-end VoD platform for global indie filmmakers: video encoding, packaging, Widevine DRM, distribution, and Chromecast App.
- Blockchain era — Built and audited contracts for DragonCoin, Blocksafe, KuverIT, and others. Co-founded VectorZilla, a blockchain + deep-learning stock graphics marketplace.
- Now — Agentic AI at FreePixel. GenAI pipelines, multimodal models, LLaMA-based RAG at scale.
Each era felt like the next layer of the same thing: distributed systems, pipelines, latency, scale, and making complex technology invisible to the end user. The tools changed. The thinking didn’t.
Away from the keyboard
I ride motorcycles — short rides around Kanpur and longer tours when I can manage it. I spend time with my family. I read over coffee at my favourite cafe.
I help organise and participate in local tech meetups in Kanpur — Docker, WordPress, HackerSpace. I’m a long-time FOSS advocate and try to contribute where I can.
Available for
If you’re building something in the agentic AI era and need a technical co-thinker — I’m open to:
- Fractional CTO — part-time technical leadership for early-stage companies
- Consulting — system architecture, GenAI/LLM pipelines, technical strategy
- Senior developer — hands-on engineering for the right project
Reach me at [email protected] or on LinkedIn.