Zakaria Guennani — Software Engineer

About

I'm a final-year software engineering student at EMSI in Casablanca, graduating in 2027. I got here through a two-year diploma in digital development, which means I was shipping Android apps before I was taught the theory behind them — and I still think that order was the right one.

What I care about is architecture: where a system's boundaries sit, what crosses them, and what happens when one piece stops answering. That shows up in everything below — one service owning the rate-limited upstream so there's a single place to enforce a budget, one schema per service so the shared-database shortcut isn't available, a transactional outbox because "wrote the row and published the event" has to be one decision or neither.

The other half of the job is the part before any of that: sitting with the person who has the problem. My best work this year started with a discovery session, not a ticket — and the feature that mattered most turned out to be a hard block that stops the software from doing something, rather than anything it adds.

I use AI where it's load-bearing and measurable: retrieval over a permission filter, embeddings in Postgres, answers restricted to retrieved context and made to cite their sources. The interesting engineering there is the access control and the retrieval quality, not the model.

I work in four languages — Arabic natively, and French, English and Italian fluently. As a Career Center Ambassador at EMSI I spend a lot of time explaining technical things to people who aren't engineers, which has made me measurably better at the half of this job that isn't code.

What I'm looking for

The short version, for anyone deciding whether the rest of this page is worth their time.

Role: Backend or full-stack engineering — Java and Spring Boot, TypeScript and Next.js, distributed systems, applied AI
Availability: Part-time from now, alongside my final year. Full-time from February 2027, starting with the six-month end-of-studies internship (PFE).
Where: Casablanca, on-site or hybrid.
Languages: Italian, French and English at working proficiency. Arabic native.
Also open to: Convertible internships and graduate programmes — especially on teams that let a junior own a service end to end.

If that lines up with something on your team, email is the fastest route. I answer the same day.

Experience

July – August 2026

Software Engineering Intern · Full-Stack & AI Integration · ABA Technology (Nextronic)

TaskTracker — a project and task management platform I gathered the requirements for, designed, and built independently over nine agile sprints, through to a containerised deployment.

Gathered and formalised 19 functional requirements directly with stakeholders, then turned them into a sprint plan I ran to completion — app, PostgreSQL, model server and WebSocket server all shipping together under Docker Compose.
Implemented a strict layered architecture in Next.js 16, TypeScript and Prisma, with five hierarchical roles and per-organisation data isolation re-checked server-side on every request. Sessions are signed with HMAC — the client is never trusted for authorisation.
Integrated an internal AI assistant using RAG (Ollama, nomic-embed-text, pgvector). Access rights are applied before semantic search rather than after it, answers are restricted to the retrieved context, and every answer cites its sources.
Built real-time team messaging on a standalone WebSocket server, authenticated with the same signed session as the main app rather than a second, weaker scheme.

Next.js 16
TypeScript
Prisma
PostgreSQL
pgvector
Ollama
WebSocket
Docker Compose

Read the case study →Live Source

July – August 2025

Software Engineering Intern · Full-Stack & Data · Guidya

A career-guidance platform co-developed with the host company's team, turning their business requirements into features. Our build took first place in EMSI's internship competition.

Built the multi-domain skills assessments — cognitive, situational and technical — with profile-weighted employability scoring, badges and personalised notifications.
Developed the job recommendations with scikit-learn: content-based and collaborative filtering plus K-Means segmentation, served behind a Django REST API with a React front end.
Designed the data layer around PostgreSQL for durable state and Redis for the hot paths — the interactive quizzes had to feel instant, and a round-trip to Postgres per question did not.
Worked against a real product roadmap rather than a school brief: scoped features with the team, dropped some, shipped the rest.

Django REST
Python
scikit-learn
PostgreSQL
Redis
React

Read the case study →Live demo coming soonSource

Education

2024 – present

Engineering Degree — Computer Science & Software Engineering

EMSI — École Marocaine des Sciences de l'Ingénieur

Final year, graduating 2027. Distributed systems, databases and software design, alongside an Oracle Database Administration track.

2022 – 2024

Diploma in Digital Development — Mobile Applications

ISGI — Institut Spécialisé de Gestion et d'Informatique · OFPPT

Two years of Android and web development — the practical foundation I was building on before the engineering theory arrived.

Certifications

React NativeMeta
Software Design and Project ManagementThe Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

Languages

ArabicNative
FrenchFluent
EnglishFluent
ItalianFluent

Technical skills

Grouped by what I'd be trusted with on day one, not by how long the list looks. Everything here appears in the work above or in the case studies below.

AI & data

RAG
Embeddings & vector search (pgvector)
LLM integration (Ollama)
FastAPI
scikit-learn
NumPy / pandas
YOLOv8

Backend & architecture

Spring Boot
Microservices
Event-driven design (RabbitMQ)
REST APIs
WebSocket
Resilience4j
Django REST Framework
Node.js / Express

Languages

Python
Java
TypeScript
JavaScript
SQL

Frontend & mobile

Next.js
React
Tailwind CSS
Android (Java, MVVM)
React Native

Databases

PostgreSQL
Oracle DB
Redis
MongoDB
Neo4j
Firebase Firestore
Prisma ORM
Cassandra

DevOps & tools

Docker
Docker Compose
Git / GitHub
Vercel
Scrum
UML
AI coding agents (Claude Code)

Projects

Six projects — two built during internships, one in six hours at a hackathon, and one still in progress. Each has a case study: the architecture, the decisions I'd defend in an interview, and the ones I'd make differently today.

TaskTracker

2026

Project management with a permission-aware AI assistant

Built solo during my internship at ABA Technology: projects, Kanban, timesheets, real-time team messaging, and an assistant that answers questions about the organisation's own work. It can only retrieve what the person asking is allowed to see — the permission filter runs inside the vector search, not after it.

Next.js 16
TypeScript
Prisma
PostgreSQL
RAG
pgvector
Ollama
WebSocket
Docker Compose

Read the case study →Live Source

TyreFlow

2026

Inspection → approved customer offer

Built at DaiL's Casablanca AI Lab: a client discovery session turned into a deployed prototype in six hours. Technician tyre inspections become customer offers that a named coordinator approves — and a hard stock gate makes it impossible to contact a customer about tyres the shop can't supply.

Next.js
TypeScript
Tailwind CSS
Vercel

Read the case study →Live Source

QuantPulse

2026

Event-driven market intelligence

Four Spring Boot services over a RabbitMQ backbone, covering all 81 instruments on the Casablanca Stock Exchange inside a data provider's 100-requests-per-day free tier. The quota is not a footnote — it's the constraint the whole architecture is organised around.

Java 21
Spring Boot
RabbitMQ
PostgreSQL
Redis
Python / FastAPI
Next.js
Docker

Read the case study →Runs locally — screenshots belowSource

Career Quest

2025

Skills assessment → job recommendations

My internship project at Guidya, built in a team of three that I led. Cognitive, situational and technical assessments feed an employability score weighted for the target role, and a hybrid recommender turns it into job matches. First place in EMSI's internship competition.

Django REST
Python
scikit-learn
PostgreSQL
Redis
Celery
React
Tailwind CSS

Read the case study →Live demo coming soonSource

EduTrack

2026

Academic tracking for students and teachers

Grades, absences, tasks, study sessions and a reflection journal in one place, with teachers following their groups and taking attendance. React and TypeScript on Supabase, with the schema, migrations and access policies written as SQL. Built in a team of three that I led.

React
TypeScript
Vite
Supabase
PostgreSQL
Recharts
Tailwind CSS

Read the case study →Live Source

OmniScan AR

2026

Spatial knowledge graph for industrial maintenanceIn progress

Point a phone or a Meta Quest 3 at a machine and get its documentation, a 3D twin and a voice assistant anchored around it. A solo capstone in three phases; phase one — the knowledge graph, the vision service and the Unity client's foundations — is under way.

Unity
C#
AR Foundation
Meta Quest 3
Python / FastAPI
YOLOv8
Neo4j
Docker

Read the case study →Live demo coming soonSource

Bookshelf

What I've been reading lately. Browse the shelf, then pick a book up to turn it over.

01 / 06

La communication efficace par la PNL

René de Lassus

Contact

Hiring, or just want to argue about message brokers? Either is welcome.

z.guennani.dev@gmail.com