I was born in Pakistan and raised in Multan. My father, Shafiq Khan Pitafi, told me I had a path years before I believed him. I went through a hard academic stretch in my teens and almost did not come back from it. What pulled me out was a newspaper advertisement my parents put in front of me in 1994, an admissions opening for computer science. I took the admission. I fell in love with the lab, the keyboards, the smell of the room. I taught myself to touch type with ten fingers, and within two years I was teaching the C++ class when the instructor could not make it.
I did my BCS at Punjab College in Lahore, second in my batch. My first salary was 6,000 rupees a month, paid on 30 August 1999, and I gave it to my mother. I left for Dubai on 29 November 1999 with a one-way ticket and a friend who backed out three days before the flight. I spent the first month in Ajman with a family I had never met. I dropped resumes door to door and read the appointment pages of Gulf News and Khaleej Times. I had a job within two weeks.
The next twelve years took me from Dubai to Doha and back. At Hamad Medical Corporation I led the project to transform the national health card system for the State of Qatar. In 2008 I joined Emirates Airline as a project manager. I studied through those years too, and in 2009 I finished an MSc in Information Security at the University of Liverpool. Then the post-crisis layoffs reached me. I was thirty-four, with two young children, a wife, no visa, and a UK skilled-migration application that had just been refused on a clerical misreading of my own bank statement.
I went back to Pakistan and started DevBatch the same year. The first attempt failed. So did the first partnership, and the second. The third try, alone, was the one that compounded. Sixteen years later DevBatch is still a single-owner company, and we build and ship engineering teams for US and international clients across healthcare, AI, and data. Some of that work I can point to: a long staffing and team-build engagement for a US enterprise software company, and a super-app platform we built for a Saudi hospital group. Delivery is anchored in Pakistan; I relocated to Dallas in 2024, and the front door of the company sits there now.
DevBatch is one of three things I run, and they are braided on purpose. DeaEssentials is a consumer health business, closer to the customer than services work ever lets you get. DeltaOne (delta1.tech) handles fintech data and Gulf-region engagements. The thread between them is the thesis I am betting the next decade on: AI is rewriting the unit economics of engineering services, and the firms that survive it will be the ones that roll up smaller shops, re-tool them, and operate them with patience instead of venture-style speed. I would rather own that change than be flattened by it.
A few markers from the road. The President of Pakistan recognized me for sustained contribution to the IT industry. I serve as Vice Chairman of P@SHA, the Pakistan Software Houses Association, and as Convener of the IT Committees at the Lahore Chamber of Commerce and Industry. In 2024 I was Chief Guest at the University of Central Punjab convocation, which meant more to me than the trade-body titles, because it put me back in a room full of students at the start of the path I almost did not take. In 2026 I joined Harvard Business School's Owner/President Management program, OPM 68. Sixteen unbroken years as the only owner of one company is the achievement I am quietest about and proudest of.
Away from the company, three things hold the week together. I train, because fitness is the discipline that makes the other disciplines possible, and the first pillar of how I think about a life. I write, here on this site, on a cadence I can sustain. And I pray, which is the part of the operating system the rest of it runs on top of. I am married, and my wife has been my partner for more than twenty years. We have four children. I do not use their names or put their photographs on this site, because their lives are theirs to publish or not. I give back through the Shafiq Foundation, named for my father, mostly without attaching my name to it. I am from Pakistan, and I did not stop being from Pakistan in order to succeed in the United States.