Waqas Raza is an AI-Native Full-Stack Engineer based in Lahore, Pakistan. He is Top Rated on Upwork with over $180,000 earned, 93% job success score, and 12+ years of experience building production AI agents, LLM systems, Web3 platforms, and full-stack applications for global clients.

What does Waqas Raza specialize in?

Waqas Raza specializes in AI agent development (OpenAI, LangChain, LangGraph), LLM integration with RAG and guardrails, Web3 and Solidity smart contracts, full-stack development (Next.js, Node.js, TypeScript, Flutter), payment systems (Stripe), and data pipelines.

What is Waqas Raza's Upwork rating and track record?

Waqas Raza is Top Rated on Upwork with a 93% job success score, over $180,000 in total earnings, 12+ years on the platform, and 15 consecutive five-star reviews. He has completed projects across AI, Web3, SaaS, payments, and data engineering for clients globally.

Can Waqas Raza build AI agents and LLM-powered applications?

Yes. Waqas Raza builds production-grade AI agents with tool use, RAG, strict guardrails, and predictable cost controls using OpenAI, LangChain, LangGraph, and FastAPI. He has shipped a deep research agent, a DocOps automation agent, speech analytics platforms, and AI-powered pipelines.

Does Waqas Raza do Web3 and Solidity development?

Yes. Waqas Raza develops Solidity smart contracts on Ethereum and Base, DeFi banking platforms, ERC-4337 smart account systems, token launch studios, and milestone escrow contracts. He works with Foundry, Hardhat, and Ethers.js.

What technologies does Waqas Raza use?

Waqas Raza's core stack includes Next.js, TypeScript, Node.js, React, Flutter, Python, Supabase, PostgreSQL, Redis, Stripe, OpenAI, LangChain, LangGraph, Solidity, Foundry, Hardhat, Docker, AWS, and GCP.

Is Waqas Raza available for freelance projects?

Yes. Waqas Raza is available for freelance projects at 30+ hours per week with a typical response time of 0–4 hours. He can be hired through his Upwork profile at upwork.com/freelancers/waqasraza.

Where is Waqas Raza based?

Waqas Raza is based in Lahore, Pakistan. He works remotely with clients worldwide across the US, EU, and other regions. He is fluent in English and has worked with teams at Delivery Hero (Berlin) and Hello HD (EU startup).

Milestone Escrow — Case Study

The Problem

Freelance and contractor payment is a trust problem. Clients want to know their money is protected until work is delivered. Contractors want to know they will get paid when they deliver. Traditional escrow is expensive, slow, and requires a trusted third party.

On-chain escrow solves the trust problem but introduces new ones: wallet onboarding friction, gas abstraction, dispute resolution, and compliance. Most crypto escrow projects stop at the smart contract and leave these problems for someone else to solve.

This system addresses all of them.

What Was Built

Milestone Escrow is a production-grade monorepo built on Base (Ethereum L2) with five distinct packages:

packages/contracts — Solidity + Foundry: WorkstreamEscrow contract
services/api — NestJS API: auth, wallet, escrow orchestration
apps/web — Client-facing Next.js app
apps/admin — Internal operations dashboard
packages/compliance — Shared compliance policy and jurisdiction rules

The Smart Contract

WorkstreamEscrow handles the entire lifecycle of a milestone-based payment:

Funding — client deposits funds into the contract for a specific workstream
Milestone release — funds are released per milestone upon contractor completion
Disputes — either party can raise a dispute; a resolver (multisig or oracle) decides
Refunds — unfunded milestones or resolved-in-client-favor disputes trigger refund paths

Every state transition emits events. The API listens for these events and updates its local record—providing fast UI reads without hitting the chain on every request.

ERC-4337 Smart Accounts

Standard wallet onboarding requires users to manage private keys from day one. ERC-4337 (account abstraction) allows the platform to provision a smart account for each user—a contract wallet with programmable rules.

The wallet API:

Verifies wallet ownership via SIWE (Sign-In with Ethereum)
Provisions a deterministic smart account address (the same address every time, derived from the user's signing key)
Manages a sponsorship policy so gas fees can be abstracted away for new users
Routes transactions through an execution wallet under platform control

This means a user can start using the escrow before they have ETH for gas—the platform sponsors early transactions until the user's account has sufficient balance.

Auth Architecture

The auth system is more complex than typical because it must support both web2 sessions (email/OTP) and web3 wallet proofs (SIWE):

OTP login: email-delivered one-time code with IP-aware rate limiting, relay-mode delivery
JWT sessions: rotating refresh tokens with replay-triggered revocation
SIWE flow: wallet ownership proof that upgrades a session to a verified wallet-linked account

Both session types share the same JWT validation and expiry logic—the difference is how they are initiated, not how they are enforced.

Key Engineering Decisions

Foundry for contracts. Faster test iteration than Hardhat for pure Solidity work. The test suite covers happy path, dispute resolution, and refund scenarios with fuzz inputs.

NestJS for the API. The module system and dependency injection made it straightforward to compose auth, wallet, and escrow logic as separate services with clean interfaces.

Compliance as a package. Jurisdiction rules and policy checks live in packages/compliance—imported by both the API and the admin app. A single change to a compliance rule propagates everywhere.