IS
Imran Sheikh
Founder, principal engineer
Distributed systems, payments, 14 years building for logistics and fintech.
About us
Twelve people.
No account managers.
We are a software company in Dubai that stayed deliberately small so the people who sell the work are the people who do it.
Our story
Soulstate started in 2018 with two engineers and one client who had been let down by a large agency. The project was a logistics system that had already been rebuilt twice. We finished it in four months and the client is still with us.
We kept the shape of that first engagement. A small team of senior people, a scope written in plain language, a fixed date, and the same faces from the first meeting to the last deployment. We have turned down work that would have forced us to hire faster than we could train.
Eight years on we are a team of twelve in Dubai Silicon Oasis, working with companies in twelve countries. Most of our new work comes from clients we already have, or from people they told.
What we hold to
Four rules we don't bend.
01
Senior people only
Everyone who touches your project has shipped production software for at least eight years. There is no junior tier to hand work down to.
02
A date is a promise
We commit to a delivery date in writing after discovery. If scope changes, we tell you what it costs in time before we start, not after.
03
Plain language
Weekly updates you can forward to your board without translation. No status theatre, no invented terminology.
04
We stay on
Handover is not the end of the relationship. We keep running, patching and extending what we built for as long as you want us there.
The team
Who you'll be working with.
LM
Layla Mansour
Head of product design
Operational tooling and complex forms. Previously design lead at a Riyadh fintech.
DR
Daniyal Rao
Cloud and platform lead
AWS and Kubernetes, cost engineering, GCC data-residency requirements.
SO
Sara Okonkwo
AI and data engineering
Document pipelines, retrieval systems and evaluation for production LLM features.
Why Dubai
Dubai puts us within a three-hour flight of most of our clients and in the same working week as Riyadh, Doha and Kuwait. It also means we deal with GCC data residency, VAT and procurement rules every day rather than reading about them. Our free zone licence lets us contract directly with companies across the region without a local intermediary.
Dubai Silicon Oasis, Dubai, UAE
Tell us what you're trying to build.
Send a short description of the problem. We'll come back within one business day with questions, a rough shape and an honest view on whether we're the right team.