Ahmed Othman | Tech Leadership
Ahmed Othman
Senior Software Engineering Manager
Berlin, Germany
Summary
Senior Technology Leader and 3x co-founder, originally from Egypt 🇪🇬. Currently looking after the Core Search teams at Zalando, based in Berlin, Germany 🇩🇪. Before that, I used to manage multiple engineering teams at Rakuten, based in Tokyo, Japan 🇯🇵.Leadership Experience
Software Engineering Manager — Zalando SE
Berlin, Germany
(October 2017 – Present)
Building the largest Fashion Search Engine in Europe (Lexical and Semantic)
- Hiring & team building; Hired 15+ Engineers, developed and promoted Engineers, Engineering Managers and Principal Engineers
- Strategy & roadmap; cross-org alignment & stakeholder management
- Operational excellence; lean delivery practices
- Recruiting & onboarding; architecture/process workshops
- Co-organized search round tables with peer companies
- Tech: Scala, Python, Lucene, Elasticsearch, PyTorch, Amazon SageMaker, Kubernetes, AWS, BigQuery, Databricks
Software Engineering Management Mentor
Remote
(August 2025 – Present)
Mentoring and Coaching Software Engineering Managers to navigate the leadership journey
Software Engineering Management Mentor
Remote
(February 2021 – September 2024)
Mentoring and Coaching Software Engineering Managers to navigate the leadership journey
Software Engineering Lead — Rakuten
Tokyo, Japan
(December 2014 – July 2017)
Building and delivering Rakuten ID unified profile and authentication for the whole company group companies
- Started by leading a team of 5 engineers, and ended up by leading ~15 engineers across Tokyo & Bangalore
- Architecture & technology selection; code reviews & reliability
- Hiring, growth & training; backlog refinement; estimates & roadmaps
- Scaled development with “scrum of scrums”
- Tech: Java, Spring Boot, Cassandra, RabbitMQ, Azure
University Teaching Assistant — Alexandria University
Alexandria, Egypt
(September 2007 – January 2008)
Taught: Introduction to Programming, System Software, Distributed Systems, AI
Software Engineering Experience
Senior Software Engineer — SolGen Labs / Floating Apps
New York, USA (remote)
(January 2014 – November 2014)
- Built Java + Spring integration between Google Apps & Salesforce
Senior Software Engineer — eSpace
Alexandria, Egypt
(April 2013 – March 2014)
- Scalable web applications; mentored engineers
- Tech: Ruby on Rails, Python, Node.js
Founder / CEO — SolGen Labs
Alexandria, Egypt
(October 2012 – March 2013)
- Co-founded company; built TaxiNTime (early taxi-hailing app)
- MVP development, business plan, pitching & fundraising
Software Engineer — Wireless Stars
Alexandria, Egypt
(November 2011 – October 2012)
Building Location-based social network; big-data analytics for product strategy
- Tech: Hadoop, Hive
Software Engineer — EDC / Mubasher.info
Alexandria, Egypt
(March 2009 – October 2011)
High-scale web & fin-tech applications like Virtual Trading and Speculation Game.
- Tech: Java & Spring; agile delivery
Education
BSc in Computer Science, Alexandria University (2007)
Graduate Certificate in Leadership and Management, Harvard Business school (Online) (2021)
Skills
Engineering Management
Managing Managers
Hiring
Search & Ranking Systems
Org Design & Scaling
Technical Strategy & Roadmaps
Career Coaching
New Managers Mentorship
IC-to-Manager Coaching
Interests
- Psychology Books 📚
- Chess ♟️
- Squash 👟
- Poker ♣️
- Snowboarding 🏂
- Cycling 🚴
- Exploring new cultures 🌍
- Countries traveled to so far in order of the time of the first visit are:
- 🇪🇬🇦🇪🇹🇷🇯🇵🇹🇭🇲🇾🇮🇩🇵🇭🇶🇦🇰🇼🇻🇳🇺🇸
- 🇮🇳🇨🇳🇰🇷🇭🇰🇲🇴🇩🇪🇮🇹🇻🇦🇨🇿🇦🇹🇭🇺🇨🇭
- 🇱🇮🇸🇮🇵🇱🇬🇷🇵🇹🇪🇸🇩🇰🇳🇴🇧🇪🇱🇺🇫🇷🇲🇨
- 🇸🇦🇬🇧🇩🇿