Houssem Zerrad

Houssem Zerrad

Senior Backend & Platform Engineer

Open to senior backend and platform roles, full-time or long-term contract, via Deel or direct B2B · CET (UTC+1)

MSc in Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence

I design and evolve distributed backend and data platforms end-to-end: service boundaries and API contracts, event-driven pipelines, and production operations on Kubernetes across AWS, GCP and Azure. Primarily Go, Python and TypeScript/Node.js, with a focus on data correctness, query performance, and reliability.

Looking for a long-term backend or platform engineer?

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Experience
8 years
Languages
Go, Python, TypeScript/Node.js
Platform
Kubernetes, AWS, GCP, Azure
Focus
Cloud-native, distributed, data-intensive systems
Scope
Org-wide technical direction, from design to production
Delivery
New builds, performance work, and migrations
  • 143s → 110ms
  • ~70% faster end to end
  • 125 vendor actions, one dispatcher
  • Cross-service platform conventions
  • Monolith to event-driven services

Work Experience

Ordaos Bio - New York, United States - Remote

Senior Backend Engineer - Contract

  • Owned the backend and data platform across several Python services (FastAPI APIs, ETL and ML pipelines, a job monitor, CLI tooling). Reported directly to the CTO on platform direction.
  • Redesigned the ingestion and retrieval paths of the core data pipeline; end-to-end time across the endpoint family, payload transfer included, fell by about 70%.
  • Cut a critical API endpoint's response time from 143s to 110ms, and a key query from 13.6s to 1.23s.
  • Wrote the Redis caching strategy for the production APIs (which endpoints to cache, TTLs, invalidation) and drove its adoption across the team.
  • Defined the shared conventions for service boundaries and API contracts that every service follows.

Stack: Python, FastAPI, Redis, Go, Kubernetes, GCP, Azure.

Master Technology Computers - Algeria - On-Site

Lead Software Engineer

  • Tech lead on Sefar, a Shopify-style storefront platform on Laravel, from planning to production rollout with a multi-developer team: scope, sequencing, and the quality gates. It shipped on schedule.
  • Designed and built its GCP architecture as code on the same model as the marketplace app: network and IAM, the data and caching tiers, and the service runtime.
  • Wrote the team's engineering standards and review checklists and rolled them out; code review cycle time dropped by about 15%.

Stack: Laravel, GCP, Pulumi.

Senior Software Engineer - Full-Time

  • Designed and led the decomposition of Fetch, a marketplace app where anyone posts offers to sell or needs to buy, from an Elixir monolith into event-driven services with Event-sourcing.
  • Designed and built its entire GCP architecture as code, Terraform then Pulumi: network and IAM layout, the data and caching tiers, autoscaling for the real-time tier, and the service runtime.
  • Moved phone-contact synchronization, ejabberd presence (who sees whom, based on mutual contacts) and SMS notifications off the synchronous request path onto distributed processing.
  • Set up the app's chat and calling stack: ejabberd for messaging and media sharing, with STUN/TURN and ICE for audio and video calls.
  • Built the authentication system: two-factor authentication and user identity management.
  • Built the CI/CD pipeline. Time to deploy went from a day to about 40 minutes.

Stack: Elixir, GCP, Terraform, Pulumi, ejabberd.

Fortune.app - Montreal, Canada - Remote

Founding Engineer - Contract

Part-time, alongside Master Technology Computers

  • Led the backend migration from JavaScript to TypeScript across the API layer.
  • Built the multi-tier subscription logic and the real-time currency exchange behind the iOS app.
  • Built and maintained the REST APIs, with OAuth-based authentication.

Stack: TypeScript, Node.js, Expo, GCP, Auth0.

IntegrationOS - Ontario, Canada - Remote

Senior Software Engineer - Contract

Part-time, alongside Master Technology Computers

  • Designed and built the stream, queue and workflow primitives the integrations platform runs on, with Event-sourcing.
  • Wrote the contract conventions that source and target integrations are built against, so one dispatcher covers about 125 vendor actions instead of a handler per action.
  • Built 10+ source integrations and 6+ target integrations, including GitHub and Shopify.
  • Top external contributor to IntegrationOS's open-source Core repository.

Stack: TypeScript, Rust, Kafka.

FelixSmart Inc. - Calgary, Canada - Remote

Software Engineer - Contract

  • Rebuilt the smart-aquarium firmware after a critical regression and got it working in production again.
  • Built the real-time link between the aquarium hardware and the Firebase backend that the mobile app reads from.

Stack: MicroPython, C++, Firebase.

Self-employed - Remote

Freelance Software Engineer

  • Delivered backend and web projects for local and international clients while completing an MSc in Computer Science.
  • Built a server for managing multiple Linux machines over HTTP for an international client, a news and events website for a local scouts group, and debugged and deployed a CMS for a local business.

Selected Projects

CloudCare: EHR for Algerian private clinics

Co-founder & Engineering Lead, 2025 - 2026. Stepped back in September 2026.

  • Owned the platform architecture for an electronic health-records system built around in-country data residency for the Algerian private-clinic market.
  • Built authentication/authorization (Keycloak, OPA, a custom Go auth-broker), application-layer encryption (HashiCorp Vault + cloud KMS), and a PostgreSQL/MinIO storage layer with audit and golang-migrate schema evolution.

Stack: Go, PostgreSQL, MinIO, Keycloak, OPA, Vault, AWS KMS.

cronkit: A CLI for auditing cron schedules

Open source. Go. Released January 2026.

  • CLI that explains, validates, and audits cron expressions and whole crontab files (overlaps, runaway frequencies, command hygiene); outputs text/JSON reports and ASCII timelines, distributed via Homebrew, .deb, .rpm, and the AUR.

Stack: Go.

GitHub →

EnsVAE: Ensemble Variational Autoencoder for Recommender Systems

MSc research. Python, TensorFlow. Published 2020.

  • A variational-autoencoder method for merging multiple independently-trained expert models into a shared latent space, with the base models swappable per domain; applied to recommendation via a GloVe + GRU pairing.

Stack: Python, TensorFlow, Keras.

Paper on IEEE Xplore →GitHub →

Testimonials

“ A fantastic job done by Houssem, as always! ”

Daniel Spataro

Daniel Spataro

CEO at IntegrationOS

“ Houssem is a great developer and a great person to work with. He showed himself like a real professional. He helped us to understand those nuances [in our system] and find a way to handle them. ”

Tom Goedhart

Tom Goedhart

Co-Founder at Barbaard Management

“ He is a professional engineer with a great deal of experience and a will to jump into fixing any problem. ”

Lucas Gozalvez

Lucas Gozalvez

CTO at FelixSmart Inc.

“ His technical skills and attention to detail were impressive. What stood out even more was his exceptional communication throughout the project. ”

Nina Rezec

Nina Rezec

Founder at Global Consultancy UAE

Houssem Zerrad

Senior Backend & Platform Engineer · © 2026 · Insights