Distributed systems · Technical leadership · Education

I bring clarity to complex systems and complex ideas.

I’m Bassem Dghaidi. I build high-stakes distributed systems, create practical pathways into engineering careers, and teach engineers how to think clearly about technology without the hype.

Explore my work Get in touch

Bassem Dghaidi smiling against a blue background — Software engineer, educator, independent voice

My work sits where scale, failure, and human judgment meet: queues, caches, data stores, platform patterns, and the decisions behind them.

Selected work

Systems that have to keep working.

The most important infrastructure is rarely visible when it works. These are a few of the systems I’ve helped make safer, simpler, and easier to evolve.

GitHub Actions · Job orchestration

Led the zero-downtime re-architecture of the data persistence layer on the critical path of queueing Actions jobs, rebuilding it on CosmosDB.

I led the move of a mission-critical job queue to CosmosDB while it continued handling more than 200 million jobs a day. We used dual writes, shadow reads, reconciliation, and progressive traffic shifts to preserve ordering and delivery guarantees through the cutover.

The result: roughly 75% lower peak database load, a major platform-wide outage risk removed, and a delivery pattern later adopted for other high-risk changes.

Daily scale: 200M+ jobs
Peak DB load: ~75% lower
Delivery: 3 months

SE Factory · Career acceleration

Launching a career accelerator for software engineers.

Led the launch of an intensive software engineering bootcamp that reached a 91% employment rate across 7 cohorts. It was featured in Forbes and recognised by the British Ambassador as a leading social enterprise.

I designed and taught the flagship curriculum, built the selection framework, and combined software engineering, professional skills, and employer access into a model I called a career accelerator.

Cohorts led: 7
Employment rate: 91%
Recognition: Forbes + British Ambassador

Mobiquity Europe · Digital banking

Taking a branchless bank from inception to production.

I led 18 engineers and architected the microservices integration layer behind ila bank in Bahrain. The platform connected onboarding, identity verification, core banking, card management, compliance, Salesforce, and international transfers.

The bank moved from an idea to a production launch in 12 months, making it one of the fastest branchless bank launches in the Gulf.

Engineering team: 18
Time to launch: 12 months
Market: Bahrain

How I think

Substance over spectacle.

I try to be a deinfluencer in an industry that often rewards certainty, novelty, and tidy answers. Real engineering is usually messier, and more interesting.

“The point isn’t to make a system sound impressive. It’s to understand where it breaks, what it costs, and whether people can trust it.”

Trade-offs belong in the open.

Architecture is not a collection of best practices. It is a record of constraints, risks, and decisions made with incomplete information.

Reliability is organizational.

Retries and circuit breakers matter. So do clear ownership, honest feedback loops, design records, and teams that can say no.

Good work should compound.

A difficult project is more valuable when it leaves behind a library, pattern, or explanation that makes the next project less difficult.

Read my field notes

Teaching in public

I teach the thinking, not just the tooling.

Through glich.stream, courses, talks, and conversations, I translate production experience into useful mental models for system design, Git, CI/CD, and engineering judgment.

450K+ views

One practical conversation about how engineers should think before they draw boxes.

Featured conversation · 450K+ views

How to Think About System Design: A GitHub Engineer’s Perspective

A practical discussion about scaling by orders of magnitude, resisting unnecessary complexity, communicating impact, and thinking clearly before drawing boxes.

Watch the conversation

Courses

GitHub Actions Udacity

Practical System Design glich.stream

The Git Masterclass glich.stream

GitHub Actions: The Full Course glich.stream

Selected stages

Building GitHub with Copilot GitHub Universe A deep dive into ARC WeAreDevelopers Open source in the UN system UNGA 77 side event Building without the buzzwords Overcommitted Podcast

150K+ people across social channels · 400+ videos · 23 speaking appearances · LinkedIn Top Voice

Career

My career has moved between systems, organizations, and classrooms.

I’ve spent more than 15 years working across software engineering, architecture, technical leadership, consulting, and education.

At SE Factory, I led the launch of an intensive software engineering bootcamp that reached a 91% employment rate across 7 cohorts. It was featured in Forbes and recognised by the British Ambassador as a leading social enterprise.

The programme became Lebanon’s first intensive tech bootcamp, was featured by Forbes, and was selected for the World Economic Forum’s list of 100 Corporate-Ready Social Enterprises. It has since grown into a broader talent ecosystem with more than 1,200 graduates.

I also led the integration architecture behind the launch of ila bank, advised Fortune 500 engineering organizations, helped establish the first open source programme office in the UN system with the World Health Organization, and built internet-scale infrastructure used by millions of developers.

The through-line is simple: I like understanding complicated environments, finding the real constraint, and leaving people with something clearer than I found it.

2020 to nowGitHubSenior Software Engineer · Senior Solutions Architect

2021 to nowInterop ServicesFounder · glich.stream

2019 to 2020Mobiquity EuropeSenior Solutions Architect

2016 to 2018SE FactoryTechnical Director

2009 to 2016Earlier workSystems engineering · Architecture · Development

Let’s talk

Have a hard systems problem or an honest question?

letsworktogether@interop.com.co