Sahand Saba

Sahand Saba

Staff Software Engineer

Summary

Staff Software Engineer and Tech Lead (Infrastructure & Platform) with 11+ years of experience, including senior roles at Google and Meta. Track record of delivering outsized cost optimization, reliability, and infrastructure improvements. Strong foundation in mathematics, algorithms, and distributed systems.

Work Experience

Mar 2025 - Present

Staff Software Engineer

Qualified Inc.

  • Promoted to Staff Software Engineer and Tech Lead of Infrastructure and Platform teams (8 engineers) within one year. Named Infra/Platform Engineer of the Year (2026).
  • Delivered ~75% reduction in EC2 costs and ~50% reduction in total AWS spend through a combination of deep technical improvements: refactored the Redis/Sidekiq workers from one monolithic pool into six dedicated pools, fixed complex load balancing bugs across anycable-go, Envoy, and anycable-rails, optimized KEDA-based autoscaling, and resolved critical Karpenter issues.
  • Transformed platform reliability and availability from critical state to consistently healthy: fixed deadlock bugs in anycable-go and shutdown issues in pgbouncer (custom patch builds), optimized autoscaling/Envoy/Cloudflare Tunnel configs, and designed multi-cell K8s architecture with Cloudflare LB for canary/blue-green deployments and cluster-level fault isolation. Overhauled on-call and incident management using Google SRE practices.
  • Built fully automated staged deployment system (GitHub Actions, AWS CDK, Docker, CloudFront) that took the company from risky weekly deployments to safe, canaried daily production releases: release branch pipelines, dev→staging→prod promotions, hotfix/rollback workflows, K8s manifest diffing with Claude integration, and custom Slack app for deployment ops.
  • Modernized the production infrastructure codebase (TypeScript, AWS CDK, Kubernetes, cdk8s, with a Go/Bazel migration underway), improving maintainability, scalability, and reliability across the platform serving a 50-100 person engineering organization.

Mar 2019 - May 2024

Senior Software Engineer

Google

  • Led the development, productionization, and launch of Google's Apps Script V8 Runtime.
  • Led the design and development of multiple major projects to improve reliability and efficiency of critical components of Google Search serving infrastructure, working with very high QPS, globally distributed C++ serving binaries.

Apr 2017 - Jun 2018

Senior Software Engineer

Meta

  • Made significant improvements to the Facebook for Android app start-up performance.
  • Led engineering efforts to help Myanmar's migration to Unicode by building Facebook's Burmese font-detection and auto-conversion systems.

Jan 2015 - Feb 2017

Software Engineer

Google

  • Led a major storage and CPU cost reduction optimization project across multiple Google product areas, in particular within Ads, Search, and YouTube.
  • Led the design and development of a complex parallelized data analysis pipeline to mine for optimization opportunities and provide resource usage insight.
  • Co-inventor on U.S. Patent 11,307,978, "Reclaiming Storage Space in a Storage Environment," for methods and systems to optimize storage reclamation across Google's infrastructure.

Education

University of Victoria GPAs are on a 9.0 scale.

Jan 2013 - Jan 2015

Master of Science - Computer Science

University of Victoria

Graduated with GPA of 9.0

Sept 2005 - Dec 2009

Bachelor of Science - Honours in Mathematics

University of Victoria

Graduated with Distinction, Minor in Computer Science, GPA of 8.0 and score of 30 on the 2009 Putnam competition.

Patents

  • 2022 U.S. Patent 11,307,978 — Reclaiming Storage Space in a Storage Environment. Co-inventor. Assigned to Google LLC.