Houssem Eddine Zerrad

Staff Backend & Platform Engineer

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 and GCP. Primarily Go, Python and TypeScript/Node.js, with a focus on data correctness, query performance, and reliability.

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Experience: 8 years
Languages: Go, Python, TypeScript/Node.js
Platform: Kubernetes, AWS, GCP
Focus: Distributed backend and data systems
Scope: Platform direction, data-intensive apps
Delivery: Re-architecture and migrations

~70% faster end to end
Billions of production events
Cross-service platform conventions
Beyond previous load ceilings

Work Experience

Full-time employment

Ordaos Bio - New York, United States - Remote

Staff Software Engineer

October 2024 - Present

Own backend and data-platform surface area across multiple Python services (FastAPI APIs, ETL/ML pipelines, job monitor, CLI tooling), reporting directly to the CTO on platform direction.
Redesigned ingestion and retrieval paths in the core data pipeline, improving end-to-end performance by ~70%.
Authored and drove team adoption of a Redis caching strategy (endpoint selection, TTLs, invalidation) across production APIs.
Defined shared platform conventions for service boundaries and API contracts, reducing integration friction and enabling safer, faster iteration across teams.

Master Technology Computers - Algeria - On-Site

Lead Software Engineer

July 2023 - October 2024

Defined and rolled out engineering operating standards to improve delivery throughput and reduce rework.
Tech-led a multi-developer delivery from planning through production rollout, coordinating scope, sequencing, and quality gates to ship on schedule.
Designed a cloud-native, serverless-first architecture to scale predictably while controlling operational cost.
Introduced coding standards and review checklists, reducing code review cycle time by ~15% while improving consistency and maintainability.

Senior Software Engineer - Full-Time

October 2020 - July 2023

Architected and led the migration from a monolithic Elixir backend to a service-oriented architecture, allowing the platform to scale past previous load ceilings.
Built a distributed processing system replacing a synchronous request path, substantially increasing sustainable throughput.
Developed a secure authentication system with two-factor authentication and user identity management.
Implemented a CI/CD pipeline that reduced time-to-deployment from 1 day to ~40 minutes.

Contract & freelance

Fortune.app - Montreal, Canada - Remote

Founding Engineer - Contract

October 2023 - April 2024

Led the backend migration from JavaScript to TypeScript, tightening type safety across the API layer and reducing the runtime error rate over the migration window.
Designed and implemented multi-tier subscription logic and real-time currency exchange for the iOS app's backend.
Built and maintained REST APIs with OAuth-based authentication.
Wrote automation scripts and conducted code reviews to keep delivery velocity stable as the team grew.

IntegrationOS - Ontario, Canada - Remote

Senior Software Engineer - Contract

July 2022 - July 2023

Designed and built the stream, queue, and workflow primitives underpinning the integrations platform, scaling to billions of events.
Established the contract conventions for source and target integrations, reducing the time required to onboard new integrations.
Built 10+ source integrations and 6+ target integrations, including GitHub and Shopify.
Top external contributor to IntegrationOS's open-source Core repository.

FelixSmart Inc. - Calgary, Canada - Remote

Software Engineer - Contract

March 2020 - October 2020

Debugged and reconstructed the smart-aquarium firmware after a critical regression, restoring expected behavior in production.
Established real-time connectivity between the aquarium hardware and the Firebase backend, materially reducing the error rate in customer telemetry and improving mobile-app feedback latency.

Self-employed - Remote

Freelance Software Engineer

2018 - 2020

Delivered backend and web projects for local and international clients while completing an MSc in Computer Science.
Debugged and deployed a CMS for a local business.
Developed an HTTP-based multi-Linux management server for an international client.
Designed and developed a news and events website for local Algerian scouts.

Selected Projects

CloudCare — EHR for Algerian private clinics

Co-founder & Engineering Lead. In development.

Own 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 — IEEE Xplore →GitHub →

Testimonials

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

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

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

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

Founder at Global Consultancy UAE