Saad Bin Shafiq

Saad Bin Shafiq grew up in a 70-person village in the Himalayas of northern Pakistan. There was no electricity. At age 12, he got his hands on a C# textbook and started learning to code the only way he could — writing programs on paper by candlelight, memorizing syntax line by line before he ever touched a computer.

Years later, when he finally entered the job market, he applied to 700 positions. He received 699 rejections. Automated screening systems filtered him out — not for lack of skill, but because his background didn't fit their pattern matching. He didn't have the right school name, the right internship pedigree, or the right keywords on his resume.

That experience became the foundation for NODES. If the systems were wrong about him, how many other capable people were companies losing? In October 2023, Saad founded NODES to build what hiring software should have been from the start — infrastructure that predicts who will actually succeed, not who looks like they should on paper.

NODES is a talent intelligence platform that deploys entirely inside enterprise VPCs — no external API calls, no data leaving company walls. It analyzes patterns from a company's existing top performers to predict which candidates will actually succeed in the role.

The platform coordinates 78 specialized AI agents across CRM, HRIS, and ATS systems, running on open-source models the customer owns. No black boxes. No data leakage. Full enterprise control.