Khaja Md Sher E Alam

Staff Engineer | GenAI - Agentic Development| Distributed Systems & Scalability
Berlin, Germany
| sajibcse@gmail.com | https://linkedin.com/in/khaja-md-sher-e-alam

Staff-Level Impact Summary

  • Technical Governance: Leading author and reviewer of 15+ critical ADRs/RFCs; as Architecture Review Board member, enforcing service contracts across multiple product domains.
  • High-Scale State Management: Optimized RocksDB LSM-trees for 1TB+ distributed state stores, sustaining <5ms lookups under heavy write-amplification. Optimised search price query to 2.5k OTAs with multi layered cache serving 400rps with latency <30ms.
  • Financial Stewardship: Delivered $2.4M+ in annual cloud savings through load-aware K8s scheduling and multi-region egress optimization and database instance optimisation.
  • Availability: Achieved 99.99% "four-nines" reliability for global platforms by implementing cell-based isolation and automated failover protocols.

Core Technical Expertise

Languages & Frameworks: Java (21), Go, Kotlin, Spring Boot, gRPC, Protobuf.
Distributed Systems: Kafka, Kafka-Streams, RabbitMQ/SQS, Redis, Transactional Outbox, Idempotent Consumers.
Infrastructure & Cloud: Kubernetes (K8), AWS, GCP, Istio (Service Mesh), Terraform, Docker.
Data & State Management: RocksDB (Tuned LSM-trees), PostgreSQL (Partitioned), MySQL, BigQuery.
Engineering Leadership: Architecture Guild Leadership, Mentoring, SLA/SLO Modeling.

Professional Experience

HelloFresh SE Mar 2024 – Present
Staff Backend Engineer Berlin, Germany
  • Secure GenAI Enablement: Designed a spec-driven development pipeline using LLM-assisted code generation, increasing team throughput by 30%.
  • Technical Strategy Alignment: Partnered with Product & Engineering to translate reliability metrics (SLIs/SLOs) into business KPIs; Align with engineering VP and Director to led GenAI initiatives (mentoring 25+ engineers) to improve development velocity by 20% (MoM).
  • High-Availability Platform Design: Architected global referral growth platform with regional partitioning, elevating database resiliency to 99.99% and establishing Hexagonal service architecture.
  • Financial Infrastructure Optimization: Reduced annual cloud expenditure by 38% (approx. $2.4M ARR) through load-aware Kubernetes autoscaling and database instance optimisation.
  • Data Consistency Standards: Standardized the use of Transactional Outbox patterns and idempotent message consumers to solve "dual-write" anomalies.
  • Cross-Squad Technical Governance: Established unified data contracts across Loyalty, Growth, and Personalization domains; eliminated 90% of cross-team integration regressions.
  • Leadership & Mentorship: Participated in tech hiring interviews, finding the best-fit engineers for several teams across the organisation; mentored multiple junior engineers, improving their technical competencies.
  • Reliability & Standards: Active participant in on-call rotation, maintaining system SLOs and writing post-mortems for high-severity incidents.

Education

M.Sc. in Computer Science & Engineering
B.Sc. in Computer Science & Engineering