Houssem Eddine Zerrad

I’m a senior software engineer and cloud architect with 6+ years of experience building backend systems, distributed platforms, and cloud infrastructure. Most of my work has been around Python, Go, TypeScript, PostgreSQL, Redis, Kubernetes, AWS, and GCP, with a strong focus on system design, performance, reliability, and developer experience.

In recent roles, I’ve worked on data-intensive and performance-critical systems where the main challenge was not simply shipping features, but understanding bottlenecks, redesigning architecture, and making systems significantly faster and easier to operate. At Ordaos Bio, for example, I reduced one critical API path from 143 seconds to around 110 ms and another from 13.6 seconds to 1.23 seconds, while also working on caching, authorization, data pipelines, pagination, filtering, and platform conventions used across the backend.

I’ve also worked in technical leadership roles, including as a founding engineer and VP of Engineering, so I’m comfortable operating beyond an individual service or codebase. I enjoy working closely with product and engineering teams, making architectural trade-offs, defining technical direction, mentoring engineers, and taking ownership of ambiguous problems from design through production.

The areas I’m most interested in are distributed systems, backend and platform engineering, cloud infrastructure, event-driven architectures, high-scale APIs, developer platforms, and increasingly AI infrastructure and agent systems. I’m particularly drawn to small, technically strong teams where engineers have meaningful ownership and where good architecture directly affects the product and the business.

Outside of work, I build side projects, write about software engineering and systems, and spend time deepening my knowledge of distributed and event-driven systems. I’m also interested in entrepreneurship and have been involved in building products from the ground up, which has made me especially attentive to the connection between engineering decisions, product value, and business outcomes.