Zia Ur Rehman
Software Engineering Manager
Hey, I'm Zia.
Engineering manager with 10+ years in software across healthcare, financial services, and employee background screening, and 3+ years leading a distributed team of 15. Own delivery and technical direction, and partner with product, operations, and security in regulated environments.
At SafeRide Health I run engineering for a HIPAA-regulated healthcare transportation platform: hiring and growing engineers, yearly OKRs, architecture, and production operations.
I got here by doing the work first — PHP and lending systems at Guidance Residential, lead full-stack on background-screening platforms at Lowers Risk Group, then lead engineer at SafeRide before this role.
Outside of work I spend time with family, play cricket, and talk with engineers about architecture and careers.
Skills
Languages
Leadership
-
Engineering management - Hiring
- Mentorship
- Performance management
- OKRs / KPIs
- Technical strategy
- Architecture reviews
- Agile / Scrum
- Cross-functional delivery
Architecture
- Microservices
- Distributed systems
- REST APIs
- Event-driven systems
- Performance optimization
- Caching
Cloud & DevOps
- AWS (ECS, Lambda, SQS, SNS, EC2, S3, Route 53)
- Terraform
- Docker
- CI/CD (GitLab, Jenkins, CodePipeline)
Observability
- Datadog
- Amazon CloudWatch
- Alerting
- On-call
Data
- MySQL
- MongoDB
- Redis
- DynamoDB
- Elasticsearch
Experience
More than a decade building software across healthcare, financial services, and employee background screening — from PHP developer through lead full-stack, and the past three years leading a distributed team of 15.
Software Engineering Manager
SafeRide Health · Remote
- Lead a distributed team of 15 engineers across time zones, including 2 lead engineers. Hired 4 engineers in the last 18 months who ramped well and fit the team; promoted a senior engineer to lead last year; run 1:1s, career growth, and delivery cadence.
- Set yearly OKRs with the team, cascade them into Q1–Q4 goals, and track delivery against KPIs.
- Set technical direction and roadmap for migrating a monolith to AWS microservices (Terraform, ECS, Lambda, SQS), improving maintainability and scale in production.
- Reduced latency on critical APIs by replacing on-the-fly data gathering and live database queries with precomputed results, then caching that data and keeping the cache correct as source data changed.
- Designed and shipped REST APIs for IVR/virtual call flows and partner integrations, reducing operational overhead and improving partner and user experience.
- Monitor production with Datadog and Amazon CloudWatch; alerts place an automated phone call when critical services degrade. Partner with product, operations, and security in a HIPAA-regulated environment; run architecture reviews and engineering standards.
Lead Full Stack Software Engineer
SafeRide Health · Remote
- Led migration of legacy systems to cloud-native microservices on AWS (Lambda, SQS, ECS), creating the architecture later owned at the manager level.
- Designed backend APIs for new product capabilities; introduced code review and engineering standards adopted across the team.
Lead Full Stack Developer
Lowers Risk Group · Purcellville, VA
- Improved enterprise employee background-screening platforms using Phalcon, Slim, and Nuxt; refactored legacy APIs onto Spring Boot for scale and maintainability.
- Owned CI/CD across staging, sandbox, and production and participated in 24/7 on-call incident response.
PHP Developer
Guidance Residential · Reston, VA
- Maintained high-traffic Laravel applications for financial and lending workflows, integrated third-party financial APIs, and coordinated production fixes across engineering and operations.
Bachelor of Science in Computer Science
Iqra University · Islamabad
B.S. Computer Science. Winner, Speed Programming Competition.
View my full resume
