About

I build systems that outlast the person who built them.

Twenty years, four countries, one habit: ship the thing, write it down, hand it over. The Oracle systems I built in 2006 are still running. That's the standard everything since has been held to.

Portrait of Khawar Zaman in a boardroom
Khawar Zaman — data & AI, Edmonton
The arc

Every era of the stack, shipped in production.

Not a résumé — the six chapters that explain how one person ends up building applications, data platforms, and AI layers at the same time.

2006 — 2007

Oracle developer

Database applications for a national engineering organization — designed, optimized, and built to last. Some of them are still in active use two decades later. First lesson, learned early: software you build might outlive your tenure, so build accordingly.

2007 — 2015

Web development & project leadership

Agency years: custom web applications in PHP and MySQL for clients across industries, then leading a team through diverse engagements. Where I learned to translate between what clients say and what they need — the skill that turned out to matter more than any framework.

2015 — 2019

Head of E-Commerce, UK retail brand

Four years running the technology and growth engine for HomeArena: high-performance e-commerce, automated workflows that cut operational costs substantially, and the discovery that data-driven decisions beat opinions every time the two disagree.

2019 — 2021

Business systems consultant, Bangkok

Roadmaps, marketing systems, and automated reporting for growing businesses in Southeast Asia — and the beginning of teaching at scale, in rooms where most people worked in their second language.

2021 — 2024

Independent BI consultant

Power BI dashboards, analytics, and data-driven growth strategy — and live cohort training for 1,000+ practitioners across 12 countries. The consulting chapter: every engagement scoped, delivered, and handed over.

2024 — now

The whole data function, Edmonton

Moved to Canada in 2024 and rebuilt from the ground up — new country, new stack, same habit of shipping. Today I'm the entire technical department at a nonprofit organization: custom line-of-business applications, a production Microsoft Fabric lakehouse, Power BI reporting for leadership and funder compliance, and an AI layer in build. Specifics of current work stay with my employer; what's on this site is the method, not their material.

Where my attention is right now

Deep in the Microsoft stack: growing a medallion platform from bronze and silver into gold-layer star schemas and Direct Lake reporting, and building an AI layer that sits inside a line-of-business application rather than beside it — with a human reviewing every suggestion before it counts.

Fabric — lakehouse, pipelines, Direct Lake Power Platform — Power Apps, Dataverse Azure AI — retrieval, document intelligence Full-stack — Django, React, PostgreSQL
Get in touch

The fastest way to know if I can help is to ask.

Tell me what you're building, what's stuck, or who's in the room — I'll tell you honestly whether I'm the right person for it.