Ahmed Othman | Tech LeadershipAhmed Othman | Tech Leadership
🎮 Tech Leadership 🧞‍♂️ Building Search Engines About
Ahmed Othman | Tech LeadershipAhmed Othman | Tech Leadership

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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 (Mar 2017 – Present)

  • Hiring & team building; coaching engineering managers
  • Strategy & roadmap; cross-org alignment & stakeholder management
  • Operational excellence; lean delivery practices
  • Rebuilt Europe’s largest fashion search engine (traditional + ML)
  • 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 Lead — Rakuten
Tokyo, Japan (Dec 2014 – Jul 2017)

  • Started by leading a team of 5 engineers, and ended up by leading ~15 engineers across Tokyo & Bangalore to deliver Rakuten ID unified profile and authentication for the whole company
  • 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

Software Engineering Experience

Senior Software Engineer — SolGen Labs / Floating Apps
New York, USA (remote) (Jan 2014 – Nov 2014)

  • Built Java + Spring integration between Google Apps & Salesforce

Senior Software Engineer — eSpace
Alexandria, Egypt (Apr 2013 – Mar 2014)

  • Scalable web applications; mentored engineers
  • Tech: Ruby on Rails, Python, Node.js

Founder / CEO — SolGen Labs
Alexandria, Egypt (Oct 2012 – Mar 2013)

  • Co-founded company; built TaxiNTime (early taxi-hailing app)
  • MVP development, business plan, pitching & fundraising

Software Engineer — Wireless Stars
Alexandria, Egypt (Nov 2011 – Oct 2012)

  • Location-based social network; big-data analytics for product strategy

Software Engineer — EDC / Mubasher.info
Alexandria, Egypt (Mar 2009 – Oct 2011)

  • High-scale web & fintech applications using Java & Spring; agile delivery

University Teaching Assistant — Alexandria University
Alexandria, Egypt (Sep 2007 – Jan 2008)

  • Taught: Introduction to Programming, System Software, Distributed Systems, AI

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

  • Chess
  • Squash
  • Poker
  • Snowboarding
  • Cycling
  • Exploring new cultures