Houzz

About

Houzz is a technology platform for home remodeling and design, founded in 2009 and headquartered in Palo Alto, California. It offers a vast database of home photos, an inspiration/ideabook tool, a marketplace and a directory of home-improvement professionals. Houzz Pro provides project management, estimating and 3D design tools for professionals.

Notable: Founded by Adi Tatarko and Alon Cohen after remodeling their own home.

What I worked on

• Boosted website performance by 20% by leading the migration of a legacy PHP-based system to a modern Python/Django backend with Server-Side Rendered (SSR) architecture, reducing API response times by 35%.
• Developed an automated background removal pipeline for importing product images from external sources, leveraging OpenCV and deep learning models (U-Net) to process 5,000+ images daily with 95% accuracy.
• Architected and managed heavy AWS infrastructure including EC2, ECS, S3, RDS (PostgreSQL), and CloudFront, ensuring 99.9% uptime across production services.
• Implemented automated CI/CD pipelines using Jenkins with blue-green deployment strategies, reducing deployment downtime by 90% and enabling zero-downtime releases.
• Configured KEDA (Kubernetes Event-Driven Autoscaling) for dynamic workload scaling, reducing infrastructure costs by 25% during off-peak hours.
• Managed infrastructure as code using Ansible and Terraform, provisioning and maintaining Amazon RDS instances, load balancers, and auto-scaling groups across multiple environments.