# Zain

**Engineering Lead — Distributed Systems & AI Architecture · London, United Kingdom**

Staff engineer with over 10 years of experience building large-scale distributed systems at Amazon, JPMorgan, and high-growth fintech. Currently leading engineering at Healf, focusing on AI-native systems and infrastructure.

Profile: https://path.cv/zaingz

*Last updated: August 2026*

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## Experience

### Engineering Lead at Healf
*Nov 2024 – Present*

Lead the engineering function, including technical strategy and architecture for an AI-driven wellness platform. Architected and shipped Helix, a production AI agent that handles customer queries and autonomous actions.

### Staff Engineer (Contract) at Thredd
*Dec 2024 – Jul 2025*

Architected a distributed card ledger from the ground up using DynamoDB and an append-only journal for strong consistency. Implemented idempotent payment workflows and real-time limit enforcement.

### Lead Engineer at The Bank of London
*Nov 2023 – Nov 2024*

Shipped a production RAG assistant for account onboarding and designed a retrieval pipeline to explain complex banking products. Automated compliance workflows, reducing onboarding time by approximately 30%.

### Lead Software Engineer, Risk at JPMorgan Chase
*Dec 2022 – Nov 2023*

Built an auto-scaling Kubernetes platform for investment banking risk workloads. Integrated Redis caching and concurrency optimizations, cutting job runtimes by 40% and reducing cloud costs by 20%.

### SDE II, Prime Video & AWS at Amazon
*Mar 2020 – Dec 2022*

Led the development of an org-wide telemetry SDK for Prime Video TV clients and built AWS cloud infrastructure to ingest millions of events daily. Delivered authentication services for Prime Video/Freevee, improving data consistency by 90%.

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## Skills

Distributed Systems · AI Architecture · Python · TypeScript · Kubernetes · AWS · PostgreSQL · Redis · LangChain · OpenAI · RAG · Event Sourcing · System Design · Elasticsearch

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## Projects

### Helix

A production AI agent using LangChain that takes autonomous actions including order tracking, support resolution, and personalized recommendations.

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## Links

- **Substack**: https://substack.com/@zainzafar