ExperienceHouzz

Apr 2023 — Jul 2024RemoteRemote (Palo Alto, CA)

Houzz

Software Engineer (ML & Backend)

Online platform for home renovation, interior design and connecting homeowners with professionals.

Industry
Home design · E-commerce / SaaS
Founded
2009
Headquarters
Palo Alto, CA, USA
Notable
Founded by Adi Tatarko and Alon Cohen after remodeling their own home.

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.

What I worked on

ProjectHouzz Moodboard

  1. 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%.

  2. 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.

  3. Architected and managed heavy AWS infrastructure including EC2, ECS, S3, RDS (PostgreSQL), and CloudFront, ensuring 99.9% uptime across production services.

  4. Implemented automated CI/CD pipelines using Jenkins with blue-green deployment strategies, reducing deployment downtime by 90% and enabling zero-downtime releases.

  5. Configured KEDA (Kubernetes Event-Driven Autoscaling) for dynamic workload scaling, reducing infrastructure costs by 25% during off-peak hours.

  6. Managed infrastructure as code using Ansible and Terraform, provisioning and maintaining Amazon RDS instances, load balancers, and auto-scaling groups across multiple environments.

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