Portfolio
A brief overview of my professional journey, skills, and experiences.
- Hassan Salem
- 2 min read
Hassan Salem
Principal Backend & Platform Engineer
Munich, Germany
Executive Summary
Backend and platform specialist with 8+ years designing resilient services, observability-first systems, and automation that unlocks team velocity. I turn ambiguous problems into measurable outcomes—recently elevating Personio’s employee experience platform with a 70% latency reduction while enabling faster iteration through progressive delivery and guard-railed experimentation.
Signature Achievements
- Delivered a zero-downtime migration to event-driven microservices orchestrating employee lifecycle flows for 200k+ users, reducing compute spend by 30%.
- Built cross-region incident automation playbooks in AWS that cut mean-time-to-detect from 18 minutes to under 5.
- Scaled engineering teams through mentoring, onboarding programs, and code review frameworks adopted across three departments.
Technical Domains
Core Stack
- Kotlin · Java · PHP · TypeScript
- Python · Go · C#
Frameworks & Tooling
- Spring Boot · Laravel · Vue.js
- gRPC · GraphQL · REST
Data & Observability
- PostgreSQL · MySQL · Neo4j
- Elasticsearch · OpenTelemetry · Prometheus
Cloud & Delivery
- AWS · Kubernetes · Docker
- CI/CD pipelines · GitOps · Feature flags
Experience
Personio · Munich, Germany
Senior Backend Engineer | Mar 2019 – Present
- Redesigned employee experience orchestration into microservices with idempotent workflows, slashing latency by 70% and unlocking independent deploy cadence.
- Introduced platform-wide SLOs, alerting guardrails, and post-incident review templates adopted by 12 squads.
- Mentor and career coach for backend engineers; co-built the onboarding curriculum and Kotlin guild.
Wamda · Dubai, UAE
Software Engineer | Aug 2016 – Feb 2019
- Rebuilt Wamda’s editorial platform with Laravel, GraphQL, and Elasticsearch, enabling sub-second search across 30k+ articles.
- Launched a regional founder community portal with Neo4j relationship insights and real-time analytics dashboards.
Kamkalima · Lebanon / UAE
Technical Consultant | Jan 2018 – Feb 2019
- Guided platform modernization, including scalable content pipelines and assessment tooling tailored for Arabic-language classrooms.
- Partnered with leadership to define delivery KPIs and roadmap prioritization frameworks.
Media TV Plus (Paltoday) · Beirut, Lebanon
Automation Engineer → Tech Lead | Jan 2011 – Jul 2016
- Built mission-critical ingest and scheduling systems that automated manual TV workflows, saving 40+ staff hours weekly.
- Led the engineering team through ISO-compliant delivery processes and introduced continuous integration practices.
Founder & Advisory Initiatives
KwikSense · Co-founder
IoT safety platform • 2017 – 2019
Originated an IoT venture delivering environmental monitoring kits for vulnerable communities, from prototype to pilot partnerships.
SmartGit · Co-founder
Technology consultancy • 2017 – 2019
Delivered digital strategy and engineering services for SMEs, combining product discovery workshops with rapid MVP delivery.