A studio, not an agency.
Aimlr is founder-led and deliberately small. We take a limited number of engagements so that the person who designs your system is the person who stays with it.
Farooq Khan
Founder & CTO
Farooq has spent over twenty-five years building software that has to hold up under pressure — from early Java desktop tools to storage platforms, security infrastructure, and cloud-scale distributed systems. As an architect at companies including EMC, Symantec, and NetApp, he has led work measured in uncomfortable numbers: log pipelines taken from three thousand to one hundred eighty thousand events per second, a platform re-architected for eighteen-fold scale, API latencies cut by nearly three quarters, storage systems proven from eight thousand to sixteen million volumes.
Security runs through all of it. He has built and led application-security practices, authored threat models for enterprise products, taken systems through Common Criteria and FIPS certification, and worked hands-on with cryptography and decentralized identity — including contributions to Hyperledger Indy. More recently he has been applying machine learning and agentic AI to engineering problems, alongside a master's in computer science (machine learning) at Georgia Tech.
Aimlr began in 2018 as a machine-learning document-processing product built on GCP — the name comes from AI · ML · Research. The studio is its second act: the same range, pointed at other people's hard problems. Farooq also maintains Jsondb, an open-source embedded JSON database used in production by teams around the world.
What we hold to
The terms we work on.
Three commitments that decide what we take on, how we build it, and what we say when the honest answer is no.
Honesty
Straight answers on scope, feasibility, and whether you need us at all.
Creativity
A bias toward the challenging technical problems, not the routine ones.
Build Responsibly
Secure, maintainable work we are willing to put our name on.
How we engage
Long-term, or not at all.
We work with a small number of clients at a time, on problems that justify the attention. That means systems with real consequences when they fail — volume, audit, certification, migrations that cannot lose a record.
Substantial independent work is welcome on the same terms. What we do not take on is work where the honest recommendation would be to hire someone cheaper — and we will tell you when that is the case.
Work with us
Bring us something difficult.
Tell us the shape of the problem and an indicative timeline. You will get a straight answer.