Technology leadership for organisations that cannot afford to get it wrong.
I lead IT for public institutions, research blockchain and post-quantum security at Université Paris Cité, and build systems in Python for organisations that hire me. Twenty years in, I still write the code.
I work across three intertwined strands, and each one makes the other two better.
Head of IT for a provincial regulator today, and before that a national railway, one of Pakistan’s largest school networks and the city’s transport and parking authorities. Systems that citizens depend on, run properly.
Track record →Doctorate and ongoing research at Université Paris Cité’s LIPADE laboratory on making blockchains scale and survive the quantum era. Published with IEEE and Springer, and a reviewer for top-ranked journals.
Blockchain research →Independent consulting, blockchain and Python development and AI systems for organisations that hire me: security audits, hosting design, RAG assistants, and live products I build and run myself. Plus teaching the next generation to do the same.
Services →Scoped to a clear outcome, delivered hands-on. Advisory retainers, fixed-scope projects or interim leadership, remote or on site.
Technology roadmaps, enterprise architecture and board-level advisory for large-scale modernisation.
Whole-estate security audits with graded findings, ISO 27001-aligned controls and vendor code review before go-live.
Implementation governance, data migration and integration for SAP S/4HANA, Oracle EBS and Dynamics 365.
Virtualisation, network segmentation, secure remote access, Microsoft 365 and identity, built for continuity.
Django web platforms, REST and directory integrations, operational automation and data pipelines, written by me and taken to production.
Smart contract and dApp development, blockchain architecture and FinTech consultancy: tokenised and payment workflows, security review of contracts, and research-backed guidance from proof of concept to production.
Retrieval-augmented generation on your own documents and data: private knowledge assistants, document search and question answering, built in Python with evaluation, access control and governance from day one.
Hands-on training for technical teams and leadership: building RAG and LLM applications, secure Python development, blockchain fundamentals and cybersecurity practice. Delivered on site or online.
Clear scope, a price agreed up front, no surprises. Every engagement starts with a free 30-minute call to see whether I am the right person for the problem.
Rates depend on scope, location and duration and are confirmed in writing before any work begins. International clients are invoiced in USD or EUR, organisations in Pakistan in PKR. Public-sector, academic and non-profit bodies: ask about reduced rates. Blockchain research collaborations and co-authored work are agreed separately.
I started in networks. My first jobs were building and running enterprise network infrastructure for a systems integrator and then in the IP core of Wateen Telecom, one of Pakistan’s first fibre operators. That is where I learned that the systems people rely on are only as good as the discipline behind them.
From 2010 I moved into public service, leading IT for the Lahore Transport Company and then the Lahore Parking Company, where I automated parking with number-plate recognition and built a geofenced subsidy system for public transport. In 2015 I became Director IT at Pakistan Railways, and later returned for a second term to lead its SAP S/4HANA transformation and e-ticketing.
In between, I went to France. I completed a PhD in Computer Science at Université Paris Cité on scaling blockchain systems, and worked as a security engineer for Alfabet-group and Zyneas Technology, running vulnerability management and building CVE tooling for commercial security operations. I remain an associate researcher at the university’s LIPADE laboratory, and I review for international journals.
Back in Pakistan I led IT for Education Services Limited, The City School Network, where we launched the organisation’s first online bookstore and a customer-care platform, and taught digital forensics at Lahore Garrison University. Since August 2026 I am General Manager IT at the Punjab Agriculture, Food and Drug Authority.
Alongside all of it I consult, I write Python, and I build things: a staff portal, a continuous security audit, a live CRM for a solar company, research simulators, and retrieval-augmented AI assistants. I also supervise student teams building their first RAG applications. I work in English and Urdu, and get by in French.
Twenty years across the stack, from board papers to firewall rules. Highlighted items are where I am used most often.
Head of IT for the provincial regulator: continuous security auditing of the cluster, firewall and directory; an in-house helpdesk and attendance platform; segmented hosting and a DevSecOps release gate for a vendor-built system.
Laboratoire d’Informatique Paris Descartes, Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science. Ongoing research collaboration in blockchain scalability, cross-chain systems and post-quantum resilience, and peer review for international journals.
Department of Criminology and the Digital Forensic Research and Service Centre. Undergraduate teaching, research supervision, professional training and keynote talks in digital forensics and blockchain. Also supervised four student teams building RAG chatbots in the 2026 Islamia College internship programme.
Enterprise IT, cybersecurity and digital transformation across the network. Delivered the first online book-selling platform (over PKR 100 million in sales) and a centralised customer-care system; ran Oracle EBS and cloud services.
Enterprise-wide IT modernisation and SAP transformation governance for one of Pakistan's largest public-sector organisations.
Vulnerability management, hardening and incident response; built CVE management software for commercial security operations.
Advisory and security engagements for organisations in Pakistan between executive roles: infrastructure reviews, security hardening and technology planning.
Lahore Parking Company, Lahore Transport Company, Wateen Telecom and V-Technologies: IT management and network operations.
Systems I have designed, built or led to production, including products I run today. Client names appear where the work is already public; the rest are described by sector.
A complete operations system for a solar installer: customer portal for complaints and status tracking, service desk with approvals, field scheduler and engineer profiles, quotations generated from bill-of-quantities templates, and project timelines.
Designed and built a single portal for every domain user: IT help desk with resolution tracking, HR attendance fed by biometric terminals, canteen booking with cash settlement, notices and appointments.
A daily scan that pulls the virtualisation cluster, edge firewall, directory and backup server, cross-references them, grades findings and emails critical ones the same morning.
Reviewed the vendor’s source, then designed five isolated network zones, a restricted vendor VPN and a blocking release gate: code review, secrets scan, dependency audit and built-output checks.
Led the design, architecture and launch of the organisation’s first online store, so parents could buy books online for the first time in its history.
A centralised platform for complaints, enquiries and service requests across the network, with routing, escalation and reporting for management.
Designed and developed a tool to track published vulnerabilities against an estate, coordinate mitigation and evidence closure, used in commercial security operations.
Discrete-event simulators in Python for the cross-chain controller and the quantum on-spend work: parameterised experiment suites, deterministic seeds, and result tables generated by script so every number in a paper traces to a run.
Larger implementations I established or led in executive roles before 2024.
Established the first 3D printing laboratory in a Pakistani public-sector organisation, from procurement and setup to training staff to produce parts and prototypes in house.
Set up a Microsoft HoloLens lab for virtual walkthroughs of buildings still under construction, so designs and site maps could be reviewed and finalised before work continued.
Developed and rolled out an electronic ticketing system for one of the largest public-sector organisations in the country, replacing paper-based sales.
Led the deployment of SAP S/4HANA across a nationwide organisation, including governance, vendor management and the transition from legacy systems.
Automated car-park entry and exit with automatic number-plate recognition and access control, removing manual ticketing and tightening revenue control.
Built an automated subsidy system that uses geofencing to verify routes and trips, so payments follow measured service rather than manual claims.
Managed Oracle EBS across finance and operations for a large school network, including integration with new digital platforms and data governance.
Deployed Microsoft Dynamics 365 in a public-sector organisation, covering configuration, data migration, user adoption and hand-over to operations.
Summer 2026 internship programme with Islamia College, Lahore: four student teams each built a working retrieval-augmented generation chatbot in Python under my supervision, from vector store to user interface. The repositories are the students’ own work, published under their own GitHub accounts.
Making blockchain systems scale without giving up trust: sharding, smart contracts, cross-chain control, oracle trust and, most recently, quantum threats to the mempool. Every project has a peer-reviewed paper behind it, and the same depth goes into the dApps and FinTech systems I build and advise on.
Federated trust-aware sharding and cross-shard authentication, so vehicles are authenticated across shards without a central authority.
A controller that keeps cross-chain batching stable when relayers drop messages or go quiet, without trusting any single party.
Protects a transaction during the seconds it waits to be mined, when a quantum attacker could derive its key. Follow-on work bounds the exposure.
Asymmetric Byzantine quorums let an oracle network tolerate untrusted data sources without a single trusted aggregator.
Heuristic sharding for DNS load balancing, layered designs that separate consensus from execution, and optimised load balancing among shards.
Scaling blockchain systems through sharding and layered design while preserving Byzantine fault tolerance.
Foundations of blockchain and smart contracts, published as a book chapter and applied in practice: contract design and review, decentralised applications, and payment and settlement flows for FinTech use cases.
Most blockchain proposals fail on architecture, not cryptography. I help organisations decide whether a ledger is the right tool, then design, build and secure it: smart contracts, dApps and the payment and settlement flows around them.
Blockchain scalability, decentralised trust and secure distributed systems, with IEEE and Springer. I also serve as a peer reviewer for top-ranked international journals; reviewer certificates are on my LinkedIn profile. Full list on Google Scholar.
Short pieces on IT leadership, security auditing and blockchain research. All posts.
Why the mempool window, not the key algorithm, decides how exposed a transaction is to a quantum attacker, and why migrating everything at once can make things worse.
Read the post →Lessons from auditing a whole estate: the findings that only appear when you cross-reference systems, and the ones that hide behind a clean-looking report.
Read the post →An accomplished academician, researcher, and technology professional with exceptional teaching, research, leadership, and communication skills. His dedication and commitment significantly contributed to the University's academic, research, and professional development objectives.
Straight answers to what clients usually ask first.
Dr Fahad Rahman is an independent IT and cybersecurity consultant, Python developer and blockchain researcher based in Lahore, Pakistan, with ties to Paris, France. He holds a PhD in Computer Science (Blockchain) from Université Paris Cité, is an associate researcher at its LIPADE laboratory, and has more than 20 years of enterprise IT experience, including over 10 years in executive roles.
Technology strategy and digital transformation, cybersecurity assessment and governance, ERP and enterprise systems (SAP S/4HANA, Oracle EBS, Microsoft Dynamics 365), infrastructure and network design, Python development and automation, AI and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems, blockchain advisory, and training workshops.
He is based in Lahore, Pakistan and also works from Paris, France. Engagements can be remote or on site, in Pakistan, France or elsewhere.
Government and public-sector regulators, national railways, public transport and parking authorities, education, telecom and multinational organisations, as well as private companies such as a solar energy installer.
Yes. He writes production Python and Django code, including a staff services portal, a continuous security audit system, a live CRM and quotation platform for a solar company, research simulators and RAG assistants.
Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) lets an AI assistant answer questions from your own documents instead of the open internet. He designs and builds private RAG assistants in Python with evaluation and access control, and trains teams to build their own.
Yes. Alongside his blockchain research he designs, builds and reviews smart contracts and decentralised applications (dApps), and advises FinTech organisations on digital payments, tokenisation, settlement flows and the security of blockchain-based systems. He co-authored a 2024 book chapter on the fundamentals of blockchain and smart contracts.
His peer-reviewed work covers blockchain sharding and scalability, cross-chain control, trust in blockchain oracles and quantum-resilient mempools, published with IEEE and Springer, including a 2026 article in Cluster Computing. He also reviews for international journals.
Fees depend on scope, location and duration. Options are a day rate for advisory work, a fixed price for defined projects, or a monthly retainer, always confirmed in writing before work begins. Reduced rates are available for public-sector, academic and non-profit organisations.
He replies personally, usually within one working day. Every engagement starts with a free 30-minute call.
By email at fahad@frenchresearcher.com, by phone on +92 321 4496762 (Pakistan) or +33 7 87 01 54 87 (France), through the contact form on this website, or on LinkedIn.
Tell me what you are trying to achieve and where it is stuck. I reply personally, usually within one working day. Remote or on site, worldwide.