About

Zaid H. is a highly skilled Software Engineer with over 15 years of experience in the field. He is passionate about programming, distributed systems, user experience, and communities. Zaid has worked with early-age startups and developers around the world, helping them scale and build awesome apps. Currently, he is a Senior Software Engineer at Pelago, a travel platform that helps travelers plan great trips, discover local experiences, and book iconic attractions. At Pelago, Zaid is part of the founding team and stakeholder in defining the product vision and guiding teams to plan, design, and build a highly scalable platform. He co-authored the booking and payment system for the core platform that serves ~150K MAU and can rapidly scale to millions of users. Zaid also co-authored a shared API platform using GraphQL with multi-regional support for merchant partners as well as internal teams positioned across the region. He is the primary author of an extensive encrypted audit logs trail to provide compliance, boost performance, increase accountability, and keep the systems stable. Zaid has also championed the partner integration efforts with aggregators and loyalty rewards providers to rapidly scale their business across APAC. He has mentored junior engineers by guiding them with knowledge on best practices and techniques by putting focus on security and user data privacy. Previously, Zaid worked at Hmlet, where he was the Engineering Lead at Hmlet Labs (R&D) and Lead Software Engineer. At Hmlet, Zaid scaled the engineering team from 2 to 16 and ensured the regular and timely delivery of high-quality features and products. He also ensured the adoption of best practices in engineering, product, and UI/UX. Zaid introduced development flow, dependency management, and automated testing using Github, CircleCI, Docker, and Docker compose to ensure that the backend API runs on identical dependencies on all environments (local, staging, production). Zaid is highly skilled in Django, Python, Backend, Web, Postgres, Integration, Docker, Salesforce, Mobile, and UI/Infra. He is interested in and loves to dabble with different areas of computer science.