Ahsan Ziauddin
Engineering Leader
#504-533 Richmond Street West
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
647-828-1004

Summary

I'm an Engineering Leader with over 15 years of experience during which I've progressed from an individual contributor working on frontend web technologies, to a backend developer working on scale-intensive backends, to an engineering manager leading 15+ full-stack developers.

I'm passionate about technology & love solving technical problems myself but I also enjoy leading teams to design large systems to solve complex problems.

My goal is to work with an engineering team that builds & maintains efficient, scalable code in service of high-quality, user-friendly applications.

Key Achievements

  • Successfully managed multiple teams of developers with a mix of both infrastructure & product-focused developers.
  • Scaled teams by defining processes, maintaining documentation, & enforcing coding & operational best practices.
  • Hired, mentored, and coached developers from intermediate-level positions into technical leadership roles.
  • Facilitated cross-team discussions between engineering, product, & analytics to ensure sound technical designs.
  • Drove technical roadmaps for teams on a quarterly & yearly basis by staying abreast of changing standards & innovations within the industry.

Technical Skills

While interesting problems are more important to me than the technology that solves them & I can pick up anything new fairly quickly, here are some of the tools I have the most hands-on experience with over the course of my career.

  • Languages & Frameworks: Ruby (on Rails), Javascript (w/node.js), Typescript, Python, Perl, Java.
  • Cloud Infrastructure: AWS (EC2, Elasticache, RDS, Lambda, S3, R53), memached, Redis, Couchbase.
  • Ops Tooling: Packer, Terraform, Chef, Docker, statsd, Instrumental, Cloudwatch, Splunk.

Work Experience

StackAdapt

Senior Engineering Manager
Apr. 2021 - Jun. 2022
  • Led five feature teams of three to four developers each, where each team was full-stack & focused on a different area of the Stack platform.
  • Revamped the hiring & interview process for the full-stack engineering team.
  • Crafted a job family architecture for the full-stack team, & worked with team leads to define appropriate roles & goals for each of their directs.
  • Established frontend & backend specific infrastructure teams & helped define their roadmap for on-going performance & stability work.

Zynga

Senior Engineering Manager
Games With Friends
Jan. 2019 - Dec. 2020
  • Led the backend technical team in maintaining, modernizing & optimizing Words With Friends’ backend infrastructure.
  • Focused on mentoring & growing both senior backend ICs & feature-side team leads in their roles as engineers.
  • Monitored monthly AWS infrastructure costs & executed cost-reduction plans over the course of several years.
  • Collaborated with other divisions at Zynga to share technical insights & ensure the team leveraged centralized APIs & libraries efficiently.

Zynga

Engineering Manager
Games With Friends
Dec. 2015 - Dec. 2018
  • Led the backend development team in building & scaling new game features that supported up to 10 million users a day.
  • Grew the backend team from three developers to nine, playing a key role in the hiring process & mentoring of each member.
  • Used a data-driven approach for capacity planning in order to ensure technical debt was being balanced with the demands of feature work.
  • Served as main backend liason for the product development & client engineering teams, providing information & insight to inform their roadmaps.

…

Zynga

Senior Software Engineer
Draw Something 2, Games With Friends
Aug. 2011 - Nov. 2015

FiveMobile (acquired by Zynga)

Mobile Software Engineer
The Score, Rogers MyAccount
Jan. 2011 - Jul. 2011

Wattpad (contract)

Software Engineer
May 2010 - Dec. 2010

Brightspark

Software Engineer
agilebuddy.com, istopover.com, jewlr.com
Jun. 2008 - Mar. 2010

Tucows

Application Developer
Professional Services
Jun. 2006 - Jun. 2008

Education

Honours BSc., Computer Science (Software Engineering Specialist), June 2006.
Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto.