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BackendAPIsFintech 2023
Careem Pay — Send Abroad
International Money Transfers from the UAE
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Overview
I worked on Careem Pay's "Send Abroad" — the international money transfer service that lets UAE residents send money to 30+ countries (India, UK, Europe, Canada, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Egypt, and more) in just a few taps. Powered in partnership with Lulu Exchange and fully authorized and regulated by the Central Bank of the UAE, it competes with traditional banks by offering zero fee, near instant transfers. My focus was on API integration and transaction processing optimization — making transfers faster, more reliable, and more scalable across Careem's super app infrastructure serving millions of daily transactions.
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The challenge
- High throughput transaction processing at super app scale across multiple payment gateways and corridors
- API integration optimization for partner exchanges and third party payment gateways across different regulatory regions
- Transaction success rate improvement through retry logic, timeout tuning, and idempotency patterns
- Real time transfer verification while keeping settlement within minutes — up to the next working day for flagged transactions
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What shipped
- International money transfers to 30+ countries from the Careem Wallet, debit card, or linked bank account
- Optimized API integration for faster payment processing through connection pooling and request batching
- 50% reduction in payment processing time through targeted optimization of critical code paths
- Improved transaction success rates by 15% through error handling, retry strategies, and circuit breakers
- Compliant, regulated transfers in partnership with Lulu Exchange under Central Bank of UAE authorization
- Worked on distributed systems handling millions of daily transactions across the Middle East and North Africa
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Product
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Stack
- Node.js backend for payment processing services and API gateway integration
- REST API integration with partner exchanges, third party payment gateways, and financial institutions
- Distributed systems architecture for high throughput transaction processing
- Redis for caching and rate limiting, PostgreSQL for transaction ledger storage