Chelayel

Software engineer  ·  Lebanon  ·  UTC+3

Charbel
Al Helayel

I work on the systems people already depend on, where the hard part is rarely writing the code — it's changing it without anyone noticing. What I build on my own starts somewhere else entirely: RitAI, an AI health assistant named after my mother.

Now
Lead Software Engineer, Cardinal Health
Also
Application Security Champion
Since
2018 — eight years shipping
Built
Three products, three developer tools
  1. 01 About
  2. 02 Work
  3. 03 Experience
  4. 04 Toolkit
  5. 05 Contact
01 about.md

About

I'm a computer engineer out of the Lebanese American University. I build systems from scratch and I bring old ones forward — the second isn't harder than the first, only less forgiving. At Cardinal Health I lead several domain teams — the largest in the organisation, plus identity and access — and it has meant both: services designed and shipped from nothing, alongside a decade-old platform moved into the present. A Struts 2 monolith into Spring Boot microservices, WebLogic to Tomcat, Java 8 to Java 21, Spring Boot 2.7 to 3.5.

The parts I actually enjoy are the ones where a measurement changes: SQL queries at five seconds becoming Elasticsearch queries under 200 ms; a synchronous email service made asynchronous so threads stop blocking; access control moved from runtime reflection into compile-time bytecode injection, so the check costs nothing at all. The rest is plumbing that should be invisible when it works — a pipeline that turns away a bad pull request before I have to, and enough monitoring that I hear about a problem before a customer does.

What I build outside work starts from a question someone I know was actually stuck on. RitAI came out of my own family. Fatoura and Rateb answer two that Lebanon asks constantly, in Arabic first — is this generator bill legal, and what should actually land in my account. And because I spend all day in an IDE, I built the Relay family so the models I use live next to my code instead of in a terminal tab. Everything on this page is shipped and usable today.

02 work/

Work

Six shipped — three products people use, and three tools I made for myself and gave away.

RitAI

An AI health assistant for patients and caregivers

In 2024 I lost my mother, Rita, to a rare genetic condition called Caroli disease. For seventeen years it was treated as an ordinary case of polycystic kidney disease — PKD is an effect of Caroli, and the disease underneath it stayed hidden. By the time we had the full diagnosis in 2022, it was too late.

That journey taught me how hard it is to track rare symptoms and make sense of dense medical paperwork. RitAI is named after her, and it is built for the position we were in: upload the reports, the PDFs and the diagnostic images themselves — not a search box — and get them synthesised into something organised and actionable.

It is not a substitute for clinical judgment, and it doesn't pretend to be. The point is to turn online searching into appointment prepping: to give someone the vocabulary and the confidence to advocate for their own health alongside their doctor.

Rita's journey was defined by a search for answers. RitAI is my way of making sure those answers are within reach for everyone else.

  1. Fatoura فاتورة

    Lebanese electricity bill checker — generator and EDL

    Checks a private generator subscription — the ishtirak — and an EDL bill against the tariff the Ministry of Energy and Water actually published that month. It knows the things overcharges hide in: that the fixed fee is billed per phase and not summed, that the rate splits above and below 700 metres, that VAT, "maintenance" and network fees are explicitly forbidden. Arabic is the default locale, not a translation.

    Next.js 16 · shared tariff engine · ar / fr / en

    fatoura.chelayel.com

  2. Rateb راتب

    Lebanese salary calculator — net pay, with citations

    Built on one claim: net pay is a pure function of the law on a given date. Give it a salary and a date and it returns a full payslip — income tax, NSSF, the transport allowance, family exemptions — and shows its work, with a citation against every statutory figure it used. A number that was reconstructed rather than read is labelled as such, everywhere it appears.

    Next.js · pure engine, zero I/O · dated law bundle

    rateb.chelayel.com

  3. The Relay family

    Three ways to put a model next to your code. Free, open source, and built because I got tired of a terminal tab.

  4. Claude Relay

    JetBrains plugin — Claude Code, native in the IDE

    Claude Code was excellent everywhere except inside JetBrains, where it lived in a terminal tab. Claude Relay drives the real claude CLI and speaks its streaming JSON protocol into a proper tool window: a live transcript, tool activity as it happens, Agent and Ask modes, session resume, and your CLAUDE.md, agents, skills and commands one click away. It auto-attaches whatever you have selected, so "refactor this" has a referent.

    Kotlin · IntelliJ Platform · MIT · unofficial

    JetBrains Marketplace Source

  5. Gemini Relay

    JetBrains plugin — Gemini, three ways in

    The same panel, no CLI underneath — it talks streamGenerateContent directly, through a personal Gemini API key, a standard Vertex AI project, or a Vertex deployment behind an Apigee OAuth gateway. With no CLI to inherit conventions from, agents, skills and memory were rebuilt natively: personas, MCP tool servers, and project memory read from GEMINI.md / AGENTS.md / CLAUDE.md. Keys live in the IDE password safe.

    Kotlin · Vertex AI · Apigee · MCP · multimodal

    JetBrains Marketplace Source

  6. AI Relay

    CLI — Claude, Gemini and Copilot as one command

    What the two plugins became once you take the IDE away. One Kotlin/JVM binary, one Agent interface, three backends that differ only in how they connect: claude reuses the CLI's own login and handles no keys, gemini goes over REST in API / Vertex / Apigee mode, copilot rides your existing signed-in web session. Unlike the plugins it isn't confined to one project directory — the agent sees the whole repo you launched it in.

    Kotlin/JVM · Gradle · one runtime dep

    Source
03 experience.log

Experience

  1. 2019 — now Cardinal Health

    Lead Software Engineer Jun 2023 — present

    • Own multiple domain teams, including the largest and the IAM team; set the Spring Boot standards and run code review across them.
    • Architected the migration off WebLogic onto Tomcat — Java 8 → 21, Spring Boot 2.7 → 3.5, HikariCP pooling — and documented the path so other teams could follow it.
    • Wrote a compile-time bytecode injection library that enforces entity access control with no reflection and no runtime cost.
    • Rebuilt navigation access control from Struts into Spring Boot, with SpEL annotation scanning that resolves the rules once at bootstrap.
    • Made the email service asynchronous, ending thread blocking under load.
    • Jenkins CI that auto-scans every PR for quality, SonarQube, Swagger and build status; SonarQube, Veracode and Checkmarx wired into the pipeline.
    • Dynatrace dashboards for pool utilisation and API latency, plus Splunk email alerts on production exceptions — incidents found before the field reports them.
    • gRPC between internal services; Kafka for event-driven processing; Jasypt and Spring Cloud Config for secrets.
    • Mentor developers and interns on architecture and practice.

    Application Security Champion concurrent

    • The named security point of contact for my teams — the bridge between the security org and the engineers, translating policy into something a developer can act on, and training them on it.
    • Own the Veracode and Checkmarx findings end to end: triage the report, clear the false positives, and drive the real ones to closed rather than to a backlog.
    • Threat-model and review designs for risk before they're built, and review PRs with a security lens after.
    • Set and maintain the secure coding standards the teams work to.

    Senior Software Engineer Jul 2020 — Jun 2023

    • Replaced SQL-backed search with Elasticsearch and custom analysers: 5 s+ down to under 200 ms.
    • Held 85%+ unit coverage and made integration tests database-independent, so CI runs are stable and fast.
    • Helped design and review a centralised auth server on Spring Boot + Spring Security; containerised the new microservices with Docker.
    • Carried the monolith-to-microservices transition by onboarding and mentoring the developers doing it.

    Software Engineer Feb 2019 — Jul 2020

    • Refactored a legacy Struts 2 monolith into Spring microservices; built REST APIs on Spring Boot and Hibernate.
    • Moved web services from all-or-nothing responses to partial-failure handling, and cut heavy API calls down with lazy loading.
  2. 2018 NAR Beirut Digital District

    Software Engineer first technical hire

    • Built the Raven AI Android app end to end — Clean Architecture, RxJava, GUI through data models — and led the Android team.
    • Flew it: DJI SDK integration with the Mavic Air, kept compatible with the older drones.
    • Migrated the client from SQL to DynamoDB and then to AppSync; stood up the test environment on JUnit, Mockito and Robolectric; owned QA.
  3. 2017 — 2018 Lebanese American University

    Undergraduate Research Assistant

    • Simulated UAV and buffer-aided free-space-optical relays against conventional FSO relaying, with four buffering strategies for sizing the source and relay-generated queues.
  4. 2015 — 2018 Earlier

    FOO · Axelerom · BMB · Banque du Liban

    • Live streaming on Android, Android TV, WebOS and Tizen; Android obfuscation; AR and sticker-keyboard prototypes (FOO).
    • Regional IT support across the Middle East (Axelerom); network engineering — IPSEC over GRE, NAT/PAT on Cisco (BMB); Red Hat 6 → 7 upgrades in security & networks (BDL).
  5. 2013 — 2018 Education

    B.E. Computer Engineering Lebanese American University

    • Honour list, multiple terms.
    • Capstone: an RFID attendance system that marks students present off their existing ID — an Android app for students, a desktop app for instructors, and two cameras cross-checking the head count in the room.
04 toolkit.json

Toolkit

Languages
Java · Kotlin · TypeScript · Python · JavaScript · SQL
Backend
Spring Boot · Spring Security · Hibernate · Kafka · gRPC · Struts 2
Data
Elasticsearch · Oracle · Postgres · DynamoDB · Firebase · Supabase
Platform
Jenkins · GitHub Actions · Docker · Tomcat · WebLogic · Vercel · DigitalOcean · Cloudflare
Security & observability
Veracode · Checkmarx · SonarQube · Dynatrace · Splunk · Grafana · Prometheus
Services
Resend · SendGrid · Cloudflare Turnstile · Supabase Edge Functions
Front & mobile
React · Next.js · Expo · Android · Tailwind · IntelliJ Platform
Spoken
English, French and Arabic fluently · Italian at A1
05 contact.md

Contact

If you're building something that has to be right, I'd like to hear about it. Wherever it is.

charbelhelayel@gmail.com
GitHub
@Chelayel
JetBrains Marketplace
Chelayel
Buy me a coffee
Keeps the free tools free
Based in
Lebanon