Ahmed Othman

Looking after the Search Platform teams, Building Zalando’s Core Search Engine, one team is responsible for the Search Experience (the backend systems for the catalog page), and the second team is responsible for the core Search systems (The Search API, Elasticsearch (main data store) and the Data ingestion pipeline). My responsibilities include the following:

• hiring, team building, team members’ career development
• Coaching Engineering Managers, to help them build healthy teams
• building the strategy and roadmap, and motivating the team members to stand behind the team’s vision and mission
• stakeholder happiness, managing dependencies and expectations, building trust with the stakeholders
• collaboration with product and engineering leaders across the organization
• the projects’ successful delivery with a lean agile development process
• ensure operational excellence of the systems
• Tech stack: Scala, Python, Elasticsearch, Kubernetes, AWS, BigQuery, Databricks

Worked as a Lead Engineer for the Full-Text Search team, building the biggest fashion Search Engine in Europe which consists of the traditional Search Engine features like (Spell-checker, synonyms, NER, strike search, etc) also, building the new machine learning Search Engine which is built using deep learning methods based on historical click data. My responsibilities included the following:

• hiring (reviewing applications, interviewing, review interviewers scorecards and giving them feedback, choosing the accepted candidates job grads)
• organizing team workshops (architecture, process, team charter)
• co-organize the Search round table with Europe’s strongest Search Engines (Spotify, Booking, Here, Mobile.de)
• lead the development (hands-on) for the Search Engine features (traditional and machine learning)
• coach and mentor team members
• collaboration with the product managers to build the team roadmap
• tech stack: Scala, Lucene, Rest APIs, PyTorch, Sagemaker.

Leading the Rakuten ID project’s teams, 2 Engineering teams of ~15 Engineers in Tokyo, Japan and Bangalore, India to rebuild Rakuten’s membership services, which includes (Authentication (OAuth 2.0, OpenId connect), Customers profiles, Integration with external companies). My responsibilities included the following:

• designing the system architecture, choose the technologies and tools used for development
• code reviews and operational excellence of the system
• hiring as well as the teams development and training
• close collaboration with product managers to refine the product backlog
• provide high-level estimates and project roadmap plan with communicating it with stakeholders and top-level managers
• together with the agile coaches, building the scrum of scrums development process to scale the development in multiple teams independently
• accountable for delivering the project on time
• tech stack: Java, Spring Boot, Cassandra, RabbitMQ, Azure.

• Lead a team of 5 Software Engineers, and 3 quality engineers
• responsible for facilitating the scrum process
• coaching/mentoring team members
• tech stack: Java, Spring Boot, Cassandra, RabbitMQ, AWS.

I wanted to continue to be an Entrepreneur but I wanted to go international, so this time instead of building my own product, I helped other startups to build their ideas, one of my clients was a company called Floating Apps now called Chili Piper. One of the features I built with Chili Piper was an application using Java and Spring stack to integrate Google Apps with Salesforce.

• Develop scalable web applications using Ruby on Rails, Python and Node.js
• lead and mentor other team members.

With 3 other co-founders, we built a company from an idea to a complete product with a successful exit, the product called TaxiNTime which enable customer to order taxies from anywhere any time (Uber was not there yet). My responsibilities included, developing the MVP, create a business plan and the company strategy, present the company to investors and startups competitions.

Develop a location-based social network, with storing and analyzing big data to be able to make data-driven decisions regarding the product strategy and roadmap.

Develop high scale web and fin-tech applications using Java and Spring stack, with Agile development process.

Teach computer science subjects like (Introduction to Programming, System Software, Distributed Systems, Artificial Intelligence).