Lead Software Engineer

Alaa
Azazi

Architecting distributed systems,
data platforms, and cloud infrastructure
at production scale.

View Experience LinkedIn ↗
Calgary, AB GitHub LinkedIn

About

Building systems that scale.

I'm a Lead Software Engineer with 10+ years of experience architecting large-scale distributed systems and data platforms. My work spans cloud-native architecture, event-driven microservices, and engineering leadership — with a consistent focus on systems that are reliable, observable, and built to evolve.

At Datavant I lead platform, ingestion, and infrastructure teams building the health-data connectivity layer that processes 10B+ records per day — handling the security, accessibility, and interoperability of sensitive health data at scale. Previously at AWS I owned the architecture for Migration Service assessment pipelines. Across both, my emphasis has been on operational excellence: SLOs, observability, API governance, and growing engineers into technical leaders.

I thrive at the intersection of technical depth and organizational strategy — turning architectural decisions into measurable outcomes, and building teams capable of owning and evolving complex systems independently.

Experience

Where I've built.

Datavant

Lead / Principal Software Engineer

Jun 2023 — Present Calgary, AB
  • Architected next-gen health-data connectivity platform handling 10B+ records/day
  • Designed event-driven microservices on EKS + EventBridge: 10× throughput improvement and 70% latency reduction
  • Led platform, ingestion, and infra teams; defined cross-org architectural standards, roadmaps, and technical strategy
  • Reduced infrastructure cost by 40–50% through architectural simplification and right-sizing
  • Implemented SLO-driven reliability, observability stack, blue/green + canary deployments, and automated operations
EKS EventBridge Kafka Terraform Microservices Kubernetes

Amazon Web Services

Tech Lead, Senior Software Engineer

Sep 2021 — Jun 2023 Calgary, AB
  • Owned architecture for AWS Migration Service assessment pipelines analyzing 1M+ discovery data points per assessment
  • Rebuilt pipeline using Lambda, DynamoDB, and Step Functions: 60% latency reduction and 8× throughput increase
  • Decomposed monolith into microservices; improved release velocity, MTTR, and operational clarity
  • Established engineering excellence practices: API versioning, SLO guidelines, chaos testing, automated E2E integration pipelines
Lambda DynamoDB Step Functions Java Python

AppDirect

Staff Software Engineer

Jan 2019 — Aug 2021 Calgary, AB
  • Architected real-time distributed analytics platform powering low-latency dashboards at scale
  • Co-led ML infrastructure modernization into Kubernetes microservices: 150% improvement in model iteration velocity
  • Designed scalable pipelines for model training, evaluation, and monitoring
  • Championed distributed systems best practices, observability standards, and CI/CD improvements across the team
Kubernetes ML Infrastructure TypeScript Java

VizworX & Physio4D

Software Engineer

Jul 2015 — Jan 2019 Calgary, AB
  • Built real-time facial recognition pipelines and AR tools for HoloLens with ~75% rendering performance improvement
  • Developed interactive geospatial and analytics visualizations for government and energy sector clients (React, D3.js)
  • Implemented computer vision–based posture-tracking mobile application using real-time video analysis
React D3.js OpenCV Unity 3D HoloLens

Skills

What I bring.

Architecture

Distributed Systems Microservices Event-Driven Architecture System Design Scalability API Design

Cloud & Infrastructure

AWS Kubernetes EKS Lambda DynamoDB EventBridge Step Functions Terraform IaC

Data & Streaming

Kafka Spark Snowflake PostgreSQL MongoDB ScyllaDB

Engineering Excellence

Reliability Engineering Observability SLO / SLA CI/CD Security & Compliance Technical Leadership

Languages & Runtimes

Python TypeScript Java Node.js

Education

Where it started.

  • M.Sc. Computer Science GPA 4.0 / 4.0
    University of Calgary 2016
  • B.Sc. Computer Science & Mathematics Distinction
    University of Calgary 2014
  • Diploma, Information Technology (Network Systems) GPA 4.0 / 4.0
    SAIT 2010

Contact

Open to new
opportunities.

Engineering leadership, architecture, and principal-level roles. Always interested in hard problems at scale.

LinkedIn linkedin.com/in/alaaazazi GitHub github.com/Azazi
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