Kareem Zidane

Summary

I’m a Senior Software Engineer with 8+ years of experience at building large-scale distributed systems and developer tools. I’m currently at Databricks working on managed ETL orchestration systems. Previously, I built software tools and cloud infrastructure for Harvard’s CS50, serving over 1M students and 100s of teachers worldwide.

Experience

Databricks - Sr. Software Engineer 2021–Present

I help develop Databricks Lakeflow Jobs and Pipelines, a fully managed orchestration system for data processing, machine learning, and analytics pipelines. I helped build features such as task values, repair and rerun, file arrival triggers, and job parameters among others. Recently I have been focusing on improving the reliability and scalability of Lakeflow Jobs and Pipelines.

Harvard University - Software Engineer 2017–2021
Helped teach and support 3+ intro-level CS and programming classes, including CS50, Harvard’s largest CS class with 700+ students on campus and 1M+ registrants online. Built and maintained tools used by hundreds of teachers, hundreds of students on campus, and tens of thousands of online learners. Mentored student dev teams.

Projects

CS50 IDE - A cloud-based IDE based on AWS Cloud9
Designed and built the infrastructure backend and the orchestration of compute and storage on top of Docker, Kubernetes, EFS, and other tools and services, optimizing for cost and resources and speeding up the IDE’s loading time by at least 6x. Built a set of JavaScript plugins that simplify and customize the look and feel of the IDE, making it more accessible to students with no prior programming experience.

Links:
CS50 IDE

publish50 - An Electron app for facilitating video production workflows
Designed and built an electron app with a ReactJS frontend that helped CS50’s production team by streamlining the transcoding of terabytes of videos, using FFMPEG, and publishing the generated assets to YouTube and the course’s CDN, backed by S3 and CloudFront, speeding up the production time of a video from a day+ to just a few hours.

Links:
publish50-electron

debug50 - A wrapper for the Cloud9 debugger
Improved the underlying gdb interface and added support for debugging Python 3 programs by integrating ikp3db.

Links:
harvard.cs50.debug
c9.ide.run.debug

Other work
Helped develop, dockerize, and configure CI/CD pipelines for many teacher- and student-facing apps (e.g., auto-testing/grading, submission tools, etc) to different services (e.g., EB, ECS, EKS, Heroku, etc). Supported teachers and students with different technical issues.

Skills

Languages: Bash, C, Java, JavaScript, Python, Scala, SQL
Technologies: AWS/Azure/GCP, CI/CD, Docker, Git/GitHub, Kubernetes, Linux

Education

Audited many CS and programming classes online and at Harvard Extension School.

Helwan University ‘17 - Bachelor’s degree in Accounting