ADIL SAMEER

Adil Sameer

Technical co-founder who takes consumer AI products from early traction to scale: the product, the engineering and the decisions in between.

I'm Mohd Adil Sameer, co-founder of Face Search AI, where I joined as a backend engineer in 2024 and went on to lead its technology and product. Together with the founding team, we grew it to more than 1.5 million app downloads and a profitable, six-figure-ARR business.

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Portrait of Adil Sameer, technical co-founder, in front of a teal LED wall
Adil SameerBengaluru, India
1.5M+downloads across our apps
<1sfor most searches, down from 4–5 minutes
20M+images in the search index
6-figARR, and profitable
Selected work

Five problems I led on at Face Search AI

<1 secCore search

From minutes to milliseconds

When I joined, a single search could take four to five minutes. I rebuilt the core search flow in stages: first down to about a minute, then onto our own search engine, which now answers most searches in milliseconds and the heaviest in a few seconds.

My part
  • Re-architected the core search pipeline in three stages, each removing the slowest step
  • Designed the in-house search engine and the APIs around it
searchperformanceapis
20M+Search infrastructure

An index that grows without growing the bill

The index keeps adding images every day and now holds more than 20 million. Running search on our own engine cut its cost by roughly 80% and helped take the business to profitability.

My part
  • Led the vector search setup on Qdrant and its continuous ingestion pipeline
  • Owned indexing, retrieval, dataset growth and cost in production
qdrantpipelinesunit-economics
TrustProduct & positioning

Repositioning around privacy and safety

We reframed the product around helping people protect their own image online. Users trusted it more, the product was clearer to the app stores, and both conversion and rankings improved.

My part
  • Led the repositioning with the founders, using competitor analysis to choose where to compete
  • Ran the funnel and paywall experiments that tested it
positioningexperimentspricing
1000sBackend, security & payments

Keeping it correct and secure under load

Thousands of requests, parallel background jobs and payment events all had to stay correct under retries, spikes and abuse. I debugged production continuously until they did.

My part
  • Stripe billing with idempotent webhooks, so a retried event never charges twice
  • Hardened authentication: single-use tokens, proper logout and session expiry, secure verification email, rate limits and bot protection
  • Job scheduling and locking with Celery and Redis on PostgreSQL, running on AWS and Cloudflare
stripesecurityceleryredis
1 tapLLMs & RAG

A support inbox that drafts its own replies

A small team couldn't keep up with support email across several inboxes. I built an LLM and RAG system that summarizes and sorts every email, drafts a reply when one is needed, and sends it to Telegram so we approve or skip it with one tap.

My part
  • Designed and built the system end to end
  • Kept a person approving every reply before it goes out
llmragautomation
Approach

How I work

Build v1 myself

I'd rather ship a working version this week than plan one for a month. Most of what I know about infrastructure, product and finance, I learned by doing it.

Let the numbers decide

Positioning, pricing and paywalls are hypotheses. I test them, measure them and change course when the evidence points somewhere else.

Get users without a budget

Since my college freelance work, I've found my own clients and users. Distribution is part of the product, not something to hand off later.

Path

Backend engineer to co-founder in four months

Nov 2024 – present

Co-Founder

Product direction, growth decisions, costs and profitability, alongside the founding team.

Face Search AI
Aug 2024 – present

Project Lead & Lead Backend Developer

Leading product and backend work on Face Search AI, plus standups and sprint planning for the team.

Persist Ventures
Aug – Nov 2024

CTO

Led a 3–4 person engineering team alongside a 4-person marketing team, through the search rebuild and early scale.

Face Search AI
Jul – Aug 2024

Backend Engineer

Python backend, APIs, payments and automation.

Face Search AI
During college

Freelancer & store owner

Built client websites and ran a Meta-ads e-commerce store, which taught me unit economics early.

Independent
Toolkit

What I use day to day

Backend

  • Python
  • REST APIs & webhooks
  • Stripe
  • Workflow automation
  • WebSockets & SMTP
  • Celery & Redis

Data & AI

  • Qdrant & PostgreSQL
  • Ingestion pipelines
  • LLMs & RAG
  • AI-assisted development

Infrastructure

  • AWS (certified)
  • Nginx & reverse proxies
  • Cloudflare & Turnstile
  • Monitoring & maintenance

Product & growth

  • Positioning
  • Competitor analysis
  • Paywall experiments
  • Product marketing

Education: M.Tech in Computer Network Engineering at Ramaiah Institute of Technology (2025 – 2027, alongside work) and a B.Tech in Computer Science from Sharnbasva University (2024). AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner.

FAQ

Quick answers

Who is Adil Sameer?

Adil Sameer is a technical co-founder based in Bengaluru, India. He is co-founder of Face Search AI, a consumer AI product with more than 1.5 million app downloads, where he previously served as CTO and backend engineer.

What does he work on?

Python backend systems, payments, production infrastructure and AI search systems, plus the product side: positioning, pricing experiments, competitor analysis and cost optimization.

What is he looking for?

Co-founder, founding engineer, technical product lead and product manager roles, plus selected consulting on backend scaling and consumer AI products. He is open to any industry.

How do I reach him?

Send a message on LinkedIn at linkedin.com/in/adilsameer. His code is on GitHub at github.com/adilsameer.

Have a real problem? Let's build.

I'm open to co-founder, founding engineer and product lead roles, and selected consulting. Tell me what you're working on and who it's for.

Message me on LinkedIn GitHub

Work at Face Search AI described here was done as part of its founding and engineering team. Figures are rounded public numbers. Views are my own.

© 2026 Adil Sameer