How I work

Staff-level engineer for when the backend becomes the bottleneck.

When production has become slow, fragile, or too risky to touch, and the team can no longer say why.

Book a 30-min intro call Free 30 minutes. No pitch, and no paperwork until we both want to continue. See how an engagement runs

You're probably here because of one of these

  • A critical path got slow

    The p99 crept up over months. Everyone has a theory. Nobody has a profile.

  • The data flow is a black box

    It works until it doesn't, and then no one can say what it did or replay it.

  • Changes feel dangerous

    A small change now needs three teams and a rollback plan.

  • The platform slows the team down

    Deploys drag, environments drift, and the infra bill grows faster than usage.

Selected results

How an engagement runs

Long-term contract, embedded with your team

  • A defined part of the backend or platform, owned end to end
  • The contracts between services: APIs, data paths and conventions
  • Direction for the engineers around it: reviews, RFCs, sequencing
What I take on
  • Architecture reviews and RFC feedback
  • Service boundary and API design
  • Data pipeline and ingestion redesign
  • Query, caching and performance work
  • Platform migrations and infrastructure modernisation
  • Reliability, observability and deployment strategy
  • Production hardening
  • Critical-path code review
  • Mentoring and technical alignment
  • Investigation of ambiguous production problems

Agreed weekly capacity, invoiced monthly

Deel or a direct B2B contract

CET (UTC+1), 4 hours of daily overlap with US Eastern

What people say about working with me

“ 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

Before you book

What happens on the first call?

You describe what's happening: the system, the symptom, what it's costing you, and what the team has already tried. I ask questions. Thirty minutes, and we both find out whether I'm useful here.

Do you only work with healthcare and biotech?

No. That's where a lot of the recent work has been, and it's why I'm comfortable with auditability, access control, and tenant isolation. The same problems show up in any data-heavy platform.

Do you take full-time roles?

Yes. I'm open to senior backend and platform roles, and to long-term contracts through Deel or a direct B2B agreement.

Tell me what's breaking.

Describe what's going wrong, and we'll work out whether I can help.

Houssem Zerrad

Senior Backend & Platform Engineer · © 2026 · Insights