I Build & Ship
SaaS Products
At Enterprise Scale.
Cegid · Europe's enterprise SaaS leader · 700 000+ active users
8+ years leading production systems for founders, CTOs, and engineering teams — from zero-to-one MVPs to multi-tenant platforms serving hundreds of thousands of users. Focused on Rails · Next.js · AI integration.
Merouane Amqor
R&D Engineering Lead
Cegid · Enterprise SaaS · 700k+ users
Core Stack
Engagement
8+
Years Shipped
80+
Products Delivered
40+
Clients & Teams
100%
On-Time Rate
Companies & Projects
I've Shaped
700k+ businesses
Leading R&D engineering teams at Europe's top enterprise SaaS platform — finance, HR & retail verticals.
MENA-scale platform
Built scalable healthcare infrastructure connecting patients with doctors across Africa & MENA.
MENA market entry
Established MENA engineering workflows and culturally-adapted productivity systems for regional scale.
400k+ French SMBs
Shipped digital presence stack — websites, SEO, and local marketing platforms for French businesses.
Senior Engineer Who
Owns the Outcome
R&D Engineering Lead at Cegid · 700k+ businesses · 8+ yrs shipping SaaS, growth platforms, and AI systems. I scope, architect, and deliver — full stack, no hand-holding.
What I deliver
Shipping Velocity
Scope, architect, and ship production-ready features in days — not sprints. Zero handoff overhead, zero "waiting on dev" timelines.
End-to-End Ownership
One senior engineer across the entire stack: UI/UX, API design, database modeling, cloud infra, CI/CD. No coordination tax.
AI-Native Engineering
LLM integrations, RAG pipelines, and AI-augmented workflows that ship to production — not slide decks. Built for measurable ROI.
Engineering Leadership
Scaled R&D teams at enterprise SaaS level. I embed in your org, raise the technical bar, and compress time-to-market.
Senior-Level Execution
Across the Full Stack
Web Platform Engineering
Production-grade platforms built to scale and convert
- Custom architecture from Figma or brief
- Core Web Vitals — sub-1s LCP targets
- Next.js / React with SSR & edge delivery
- Headless CMS integration (Contentful, Sanity)
- SEO-structured semantic markup
- Micro-interaction & animation layer
High-Conversion Landing Pages
Conversion-engineered pages shipped in days
- Conversion-rate-optimized information architecture
- A/B test–ready component structure
- 3–7 day delivery — no sprint planning
- Lead capture, webhooks & CRM sync
- GA4, GTM & heatmap instrumentation
- Pixel-perfect across all viewports
SaaS MVP & Product Engineering
Zero-to-production SaaS architecture, owned end-to-end
- Rails / Next.js full-stack architecture
- Auth, RBAC & multi-tenancy by design
- Stripe billing & subscription lifecycle
- REST / GraphQL API with OpenAPI spec
- Onboarding flows & activation funnels
- Cloud-native, horizontally scalable from day 1
LLM & AI Systems
Production AI that ships — not PowerPoint AI
- GPT-4 / Claude API integration & prompt engineering
- RAG pipelines with pgvector / Pinecone
- Semantic search & embeddings infrastructure
- AI-augmented internal tooling with real ROI
- LangChain / custom orchestration layers
- Streaming UX, token budgeting & cost control
API Design & SaaS Orchestration
Integrate any system. Own the data flow.
- REST & GraphQL API design with versioning
- Webhook pipelines & event-driven architecture
- n8n / Make / Zapier workflow automation
- CRM, ERP & data warehouse integrations
- Payment gateway & billing system wiring
- Third-party SDK abstraction & resilience
Fractional CTO & Engineering Leadership
Senior technical leadership without the full-time overhead
- Fractional CTO for seed-to-Series B startups
- Architecture audits & technical debt roadmap
- DORA metrics, CI/CD & deployment pipelines
- Engineering team coaching & 1-on-1 mentoring
- Hiring pipeline, technical screen & onboarding
- Sprint cadence, backlog governance & OKRs
Compressed Time-to-Market
Growth pages in 3–7 days. Fully architected MVPs in 4–8 weeks.
Distributed & Async-Ready
Embedded with teams across France, UK, Germany, Morocco, and beyond.
Fixed-Scope or Retainer
Predictable fixed-price delivery or hourly retainer — no billing surprises.
Production-Grade Depth,
Every Layer of the Stack
Frontend & UI
Backend
Databases
DevOps & Cloud
AI & Automation
Leadership
IC to Engineering Lead —
8 Years of Compounding Depth
R&D Engineering Team Leader (Ruby on Rails)
CurrentLeading R&D engineering teams inside one of Europe's top enterprise SaaS companies — trusted by 700,000+ businesses across finance, HR, and retail. Accountable for technical roadmap, architectural decisions, and end-to-end delivery velocity across multiple product squads.
Responsibilities
- Own technical architecture & engineering roadmap
- Drive 0-to-1 feature delivery across squads
- Establish DORA metrics & CI/CD best practices
- Mentor engineers from mid to senior level
- Lead cross-functional alignment with product & design
- Govern code quality, PR reviews & incident response
Senior Full-Stack Engineer (Ruby on Rails)
Operated as a high-output senior IC on business-critical Rails applications. Owned complex feature areas end-to-end — from database schema design through API contract to frontend integration — while raising the technical bar for junior engineers.
Contributions
- Architect and ship business-critical Rails features
- Design normalized schemas & optimize slow queries
- Build and version REST APIs consumed by web & mobile
- Reduce page load P95 through profiling & caching
- Lead code reviews & enforce engineering standards
- Mentor and pair with junior engineers weekly
Full-Stack Developer
Built production web applications across the full stack — front to back. Developed foundational depth in database modeling, REST API design, and iterative Agile delivery that anchors senior-level intuition today.
Contributions
- Deliver full-stack features in Rails monoliths
- Design relational schemas in MySQL & PostgreSQL
- Build and consume REST APIs across service boundaries
- Write JavaScript UI components and jQuery integrations
- Maintain Git-based branching workflows in team settings
- Operate in Agile/Scrum sprints with weekly releases
Full timeline & references on request · Verify on LinkedIn →
Hard Technical Problems,
Quantified Business Impact
Enterprise AI Knowledge System
Designed and shipped a RAG-based knowledge assistant that gives employees instant, cited answers across thousands of internal documents — eliminating the support queue for institutional knowledge.
60%
Support tickets eliminated
3×
Faster knowledge retrieval
2h
Reclaimed per engineer/day
92%
Answer accuracy (human eval)
Challenge
Knowledge workers were spending 2–3 hours daily grepping through Confluence, Notion, and shared drives. Tribal knowledge lived in Slack threads and people's heads — unretreivable at scale.
Solution
Built a production RAG pipeline: Rails ingestion workers chunk and embed documents via OpenAI Embeddings, store vectors in pgvector, and retrieve semantically ranked context at query time. GPT-4 synthesizes answers with source citations. Sidekiq handles async re-indexing on document updates.
Legacy Rails Monolith → Scalable Multi-Tenant SaaS
Led a full architectural re-engineering of a Rails monolith buckling under 50k users. Delivered 4× performance headroom and 45% infrastructure savings without a rewrite or downtime.
4×
Throughput improvement
99.9%
Uptime SLA achieved
45%
Infrastructure cost reduction
8s→0.8s
P95 response time
Challenge
P95 page loads at 4–8 seconds, frequent peak-hour downtime, and a codebase so tightly coupled that any feature change risked cascading failures. Churn was accelerating. The board was asking questions.
Solution
Executed a full query-plan audit across 200+ endpoints, surfaced 12 critical N+1s and missing indexes. Introduced Redis caching at the model and fragment layers, extracted hot paths into Rails engines, and containerized with Docker for horizontal scaling. Led a 6-person team through a 4-month phased rollout — zero downtime migrations throughout.
Broken Dev Team → High-Velocity Delivery Engine
Embedded as engineering lead into a 15-person team shipping once a month with chronic rollbacks. Rebuilt the delivery system from the ground up — DORA metrics, CI/CD pipeline, sprint discipline, and psychological safety.
Daily
Deployment frequency
3×
Feature throughput increase
70%
Rollback rate reduction
89%
Engineer satisfaction score
Challenge
Monthly deploys with 30%+ rollback rate. Sprint planning consumed 4+ hours with no clear output. Engineers context-switched across 3–5 parallel tracks, blockers went unresolved for days, and there was zero observability into deployment health.
Solution
Introduced 2-week Scrum sprints with a hard Definition of Done, backlog grooming ceremonies, and async-first standup format. Built a GitHub Actions CI/CD pipeline with feature flags for safe progressive rollouts. Instrumented Datadog for DORA metric tracking. Ran weekly 1-on-1s and established a blameless incident culture.
What CTOs & Founders
Say After Shipping Together
“Merouane completely transformed how our engineering team operates. We went from shipping every month to shipping every day. He brought structure, clarity, and genuine care for both the technical quality and the people on the team.”
Sophie Laurent
Co-founder & CEO · Flowie
Paris, France
“We hired Merouane to audit our Rails codebase and he delivered a comprehensive report that saved us from a very expensive scaling crisis. His AI integration work that followed was equally impressive — we now save 15+ hours a week.”
James Harrington
CTO · Pronto.io
London, UK
“I've worked with many freelancers but Merouane is in a different league. He thinks like a CTO, communicates like a product manager, and codes like a senior engineer. He delivered our platform rebuild 2 weeks ahead of schedule.”
Nadia El Fassi
Product Director · TalentBridge
Casablanca, Morocco
“Our legacy Rails app had 6+ second page loads. Merouane came in, identified the root causes in days, and over 6 weeks rebuilt the performance layer. We're now at sub-second loads and our infrastructure bill dropped by half.”
Marcus Stein
Head of Engineering · Docspace GmbH
Berlin, Germany
“Merouane mentored our entire engineering team for 6 months and the improvement has been remarkable. Engineers who were struggling are now confidently delivering features independently. He has a rare ability to explain complex things simply.”
Amira Benali
VP Engineering · Yassir
Algiers, Algeria
“We brought Merouane in for what we thought was a 2-month Rails project. He's now been our fractional CTO for over a year. His depth of knowledge in both technical architecture and team dynamics is exactly what we needed.”
Thomás Ferreira
Founder · Gestão360
Lisbon, Portugal
50+
Production Systems Shipped
8+
Years in Production Engineering
4.9★
Client Satisfaction Score
12+
Countries & Markets Served