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Abdelrahman Kandil. Software engineer in Hamburg, Germany: mostly backend, across the whole stack when a project calls for it.
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Abdelrahman Kandil

Hi, I’m Abdelrahman :) I’m a software engineer in Hamburg, Germany, and I’ve been building software professionally since 2020, mostly on the backend, though I work across the whole stack when a project calls for it.

My CV has the full history, and the FAQ answers the questions people usually ask me.

How I got here

I’ve always loved video games, especially MMOs, and tinkering with mods. I knew I wanted to get into computers somehow, but it was while studying Computer Science at Ain Shams University in Cairo that I found my passion: programming, and being the mind behind the screen, the architect of the system. That’s what pulled me towards backend engineering.

In July 2020, while I was still studying, I joined Synapse Analytics as a backend intern. My first project was rewriting an old application a global money-transfer company used for transfers between its branches; the new version was more than 30% faster, and the people using it didn’t have to relearn anything.

I stayed on as a backend developer, and in a fast-moving startup I got to build a lot. I worked on the core of Konan, our MLOps platform, which let major banks and financial institutions run hundreds of models in production without building any ML infrastructure themselves: they brought the data, we handled deploying, retraining and serving. I helped make Konan run fully air-gapped and self-hosted for clients who needed it, owning the work to make its services configurable enough to run on their own infrastructure. I also designed and built, on my own, the authentication, subscription and billing services every Synapse product relied on. I also built the backend for a video analytics product that streamed hundreds of security cameras with live model inference. Along the way I mentored interns and juniors, onboarded new developers, and gave talks on things like Celery’s pitfalls.

I loved my time there, and I believed in the vision the company had as a rising startup. But I wanted to push myself further as an engineer, and I’d always wanted to work abroad, where so much of the industry is. So at the end of 2023 I joined RegioHelden, and in mid-2024 I moved to Hamburg, where I work remotely.

At RegioHelden I’ve moved between several teams. For about a year I was the only developer on a nationwide digital out-of-home advertising platform, running tens of thousands of campaigns and ads on thousands of screens in cities across Germany. I owned it end to end, working directly with the product owner and clients. I built in-house ad creation from scratch, so clients can have our designers make their ads through a workflow with built-in chat and review loops, and I built the AI pipeline integration and inter-company APIs with our client’s AI model team. I also made campaigns and ads load much faster.

When the team grew, I onboarded the new developers and the new product owner, and set the review and testing standards the team still uses. These days I work on other advertising projects with other developers.

Side projects

Outside work I build things, mostly for myself. The biggest is Subtracker, which finds the recurring subscriptions in my bank’s CSV exports and gives me budget summaries. I’m its main user, but I built it like a production system: a Django REST API with the analysis running as Temporal workflows, an Angular frontend, sign-in with two-factor authentication, and a separate status service written in Rust. Changes go through linting, type checks and tests for each part before the Docker images are built for deployment.

The rest, including Git Scope Explorer, a VS Code extension with over 800 downloads, and a plagiarism detector for programming assignments that renamed variables can’t fool, are on the Projects page.

Work with me

I’m open to new roles, freelance and contract work, or just talking shop about backend engineering. Email me at akandeeldev@outlook.com with a bit of context and I’ll get back to you. Everything else is on my links page.