Hi, my name is Mike Hajj and i’m a Cloud Solutions Architect and DevOp Engineer, and I help people build and launch online products by providing strategies and coaching.
Expertise
I am a cloud solutions architect, expert in several areas including planning, designing, implementing, deploying and managing SAAS applications.
Projects
Take a glance at some of the products I built over the years.
Clients
Here’s what some of the great folks I’ve had the pleasure of working with are saying.
Rick Valdez
I have had the opportunity to work with Mike Hajj as a co-founder for several years. Mike is not only a highly skilled technologist but also leads by example in his role as a technology advisor and manager. Mike’s leadership skills are exemplified by his honesty, integrity, and trustworthiness.
Corsair USA / Founder & CEO
Jad El Jerdy
I have had the pleasure of working with Mike on multiple high-level complex projects; His knowledge of the industry and his eloquence allowed us to quickly simplify the propositions at hand and ultimately design elegant and simple solutions to handle all façades of the projects.
Pixi Interactive SARL / CEO
Jean Saliba
Faced with technical problems that required innovative solutions, I had the opportunity of working with Mike on multiple projects. He has a unique approach to tackling and simplifying the complexity of our problems and designing adequate and reliable solutions. He’s simply a professional.
Preset Solutions / Founder & CEO
About
Cloud Solutions Architect & Consultant, specialized in designing and building scalable high traffic SAAS products and deploying them on elastic infrastructure to serve large markets.
Specialities
Designing high traffic and scalable SAAS products capable of serving large markets and built from complex applications that include Multitenant systems following different design patterns such as Microservices, Service Oriented Architecture, Space Based, Event-Driven & Multi-tier.
Ensuring amazing code quality deliverables by setting up automated Test Driven Development platforms & Business Driven Development and speeding up the delivery of code fixes & updates by establishing Continuous Integration & Continuous Delivery pipelines.
Designing blueprints for environments capable composed from different technologies and resources, building and deploying these environments on a scalable and elastic infrastructure using Docker & Kubernetes and across several cloud provider such as Google Cloud Platform, AWS and MongoDB Atlas.
Planning roadmaps, backlogs and sprints and supervising the progress and deliverables of multiple teams as well as coaching, mentoring and training on multiple technologies and hosting platforms.
The Story
Hi, I’m Mike Hajj and i am a cloud solutions architect and consultant.
I started my journey back in 2005 as a web developer working for Net Design Plus. I was 20 years old at the time, had graduated a year ahead of schedule and had already landed my first job … for my family, I was a “success” story!
Working for Net Design Plus was an amazing phase in my life as I got the chance to learn and master different technologies and was exposed to several challenging products. During my time there, I developed over 30 web applications for industries in different sectors located between Lebanon and Qatar. But I wasn’t completely satisfied; something felt missing. The company fed me a lot of projects and threw many challenges but still, it wasn’t enough.
Moving Up the Ladder
Fast forward five years, in 2010, I was approached by Domtech who asked me to help establish the Domtech Web Solutions department. Back then, the company only dealt with hardware solutions and wanted to augment its services by introducing web applications as well.
At Domtech, I was the department manager responsible for sales, marketing, management, and development. I designed a proprietary framework and on-boarded around 30 clients in 3 years. Together, Domtech and I helped dozens of clients in Lebanon adopt digital transformation and some of these clients where governmental institutions.
One day, In 2013, I was having lunch with a friend from university days, we haven’t seen each other for a long time and he asked me what I do. Of course, I bragged about my story and the accomplishments I have done so far. Then he said, “so you have been doing the same thing for the last 8 years; you must be good at it, amazing!”.
To be honest, I felt proud and disappointed at the same time when he said that. I mean I was doing well, but the idea of doing the same thing over and over made me feel as if I plateaued at some point and I didn’t notice that!
First Pivot!
Later on that year, I joined the worldwide Rakuten family and became a member of the core development team at Rakuten Loyalty which was based in Boston USA. At the time, Rakuten was expanding fast throughout the United States and was acquiring big firms and merchants like www.buy.com and www.viber.com, transforming them to become part of the Rakuten Family (more).
For me it was exciting; new unfamiliar territory, harder new challenges, no longer doing small to medium scale projects … leveling up! By then, I was making more money and I was building internal systems that served millions of users and handled terabytes of data every month.
Second Pivot!
I spent 2 years designing and building systems for high traffic load. I realized that this wasn’t an easy job because there was a lot of plumbing to do. The amount of work that engineers needed to put to set up and configure the systems they are building and the environments that these systems should run on required a huge effort. And they haven’t started to code what these systems were supposed to do!
So by the end of 2015, I left the Rakuten family and I co-founded the open-source platform (SOAJS). SOAJS helps engineers build microservices and APIs in just a few minutes. The approach was to automate all the common steps that an engineer puts in place and remove all the gears that he needs to add to the systems he is building allowing him to focus more on dictating what the system should do. By the end of 2018, the SOAJS technology reached around 650 thousand downloads and is still growing to this day.
Right Now!
Working on the SOAJS project shed light on several painful areas that products might face and cause if these products were not planned and implemented via a solid strategy. That’s when I realized that there are many people out there facing the same problem when it comes to launching products successfully and see them evolve and grow over time.
Today, I use the knowledge and skillset I have acquired over the years to help others with amazing, innovative and creative ideas push them into the market and see them achieve their dreams.
I have more than a decade of experience on how to build scalable products that serve big markets and that can adapt to change. This experience spans over several areas from planning, architecting, designing, building, implementing, deploying, managing and maintaining product solutions over the web.
I also coach and consultant as a cloud solutions architect and I have helped several clients build many products, apps, e-commerce, marketplaces, directory search engines, and SAAS solutions. Currently, I live in Beirut – Lebanon operating as an independent Cloud Solutions Architect and can be reached via this website and my LinkedIn.
Nothing makes me happier than seeing the look on people’s faces when their dreams come to life. I am always eager to hear your story, I am always ready to help out and it is always a pleasure working with people with ideas to change the world we live to a better place.
Contact
Fill out the form below to send your message.
Before you send a message, I feel it is important to mention that I receive a lot of emails on a daily basis which makes it a bit hard to reply instantly.
However, I am always eager to help you out and I promise to get back to you the minute I can.