Berlin · Open to select conversations

Mohamed Handaoui

Engineering Manager and full-stack engineer. I ship products that millions of people touch — and coach the small, sharp teams that build them.

handaoui.mohamed@gmail.com / +49 151 5255 4041 / handaoui.com / in/mohammedhandaoui / gh/handaoui-mohamed

In short

I like the parts of software that have to be quietly correct — recording pipelines, mobile clients that can't drop a frame, schedulers that hold a guarantee. From writing MapReduce schedulers in a French research lab to leading engineering at a platform touching most of the top-grossing games on mobile.

Experience

PlaytestCloud — Berlin, Germany

Jan 2021 → Present · 5 yrs

Remote playtesting for game studios. A 1.5M-strong verified player panel, video + audio + touch capture on native iOS and Android, AI-assisted analysis back to studios inside 48 hours. I've worn four hats here and written most of the stack at least once.

Engineering Manager

Mar 2026 → now
  • Lead a cross-functional group across mobile clients, platform services and the recording pipeline — hiring, roadmap, 1:1s. Partner with the CEO on the next wave of moderated and live playtesting: the kind of feature that only works if latency is boring.

Tech Lead · Software Engineer

Jul 2024 → Mar 2026
  • Managed the team — sprint planning with product owners, mentorship, growth plans. Wrote fewer PRs, unblocked more.
  • Established the review rituals and RFC cadence the team still runs on; regular direct line to the CEO.

Senior Software Engineer

Jul 2023 → Jul 2024
  • Led the AngularJS → Angular migration of the customer and admin platforms — kept Rails compatibility intact, improved build times, set frontend conventions the team adopted wholesale.
  • Owned the annual iOS / Android OS upgrade cadence; mentored juniors into mid and senior scope.

Software Engineer

Jan 2021 → Jul 2023
  • Shipped across the stack: Rails + Angular on web, Flutter + native Swift / Kotlin on mobile. Built the automatic injection of security and recording code into Android game builds — the mechanism that lets players test a studio's game without ever touching the binary.

Research Software Engineer · IRT b<>com

Mar 2019 → Dec 2020 · Rennes

Cloud & Distributed Systems lab at one of France's eight state-endorsed technology research institutes. Worked on leveraging ephemeral cloud resources to run data-intensive Hadoop MapReduce workloads at lower cost while honoring SLAs.

  • Designed and built Salamander, a heterogeneity- and volatility-aware MapReduce scheduler. Reduced job time by up to 47.6% over state-of-the-art on mixed workloads. Published at IEEE/ACM CCGRID 2020.
  • Co-authored follow-ups on RL scheduling policies — Releaser and RISCLESS — for SLA guarantees on mixed ephemeral + stable cloud resources. Validated against real data-center traces.

Earlier · Swissport · Moussafir · Wilab · UNICEF Innovation Lab

2015 → 2017 · Algiers
  • Swissport — Built G-Vol, a web + Android tool digitising flight-file prep. Moussafir — shipped an Electron/Angular CRM MVP in four weeks. Wilab — real-estate CRM with AngularJS + Flask, dockerised.
  • UNICEF Innovation Lab at ESI — Two and a half years volunteering on civic-tech projects for children, the elderly and people with disabilities.