Hi, again 👋
I have been fortunate to get to work on a lot of unique opportunities, from building custom Linux distributions for self-driving cars 🚗 to scaling a Silicon Valley startup in home fitness 🏋️as the first founding engineer from early stage to Series D during Covid. I’ve learned a lot from great colleagues and challenges along the way, and I look forward to paying it forward and sharing my learnings with others as well 😀
Here’s a brief overview of my journey so far.
August 2017
Embedded Software Engineer @ Valeo
Having studied electronics and communication Engineering in one of Egypt's top universities: Cairo University, I did learn a lot about the inner workings of both networks and processors. However, after studying both for 5 years in college, the main takeaway for me was that I didn't really find myself doing either as a career 😂 They felt too low-level and abstract from real applications.
The first job I got out of college was as an embedded software engineer in Valeo, A large French company in the automotive industry, with one of their biggest R&D centers in Egypt.
I worked with my team on a core part of one of Honda's self-driving cars; specifically the sensor fusion platform, where our job was to take readings from all the different types of sensors that the car had on board (cameras, radars, lidars, etc…), merge them, and produce a map in real-time, so that the car knows where it is and where the objects around it are.
Sounds pretty cool, right? It was, and I learned a lot while working on that project. However, even though we had this really cool application of the technology, I found that I spent most of my time working on writing c and assembly code, going through data sheets for custom hardware, and looking at meaningless dots on charts.
Very low-level things again… To the point where despite working on the project for nearly 2 years, I never actually got to see the car itself! We’d spend months on end for example trying to get 2 pieces of hardware to talk together before we get to the application logic 🤯
2018
Top Rated Freelancer @ Upwork
I started freelancing part-time on Upwork. This allowed me to explore different fields in a lower-risk setting than a full-time job, and the direct client interactions really helped shape my sense of how impactful and problem-oriented engineering is, which helped shape my mindset in ways I didn't recognize until much later.
I explored different fields: machine learning, computer vision, data science, and web scraping, before finally landing on backend and cloud computing. I fell in love with the field for many reasons:
- It leveraged my existing low-level experience (I was now working on custom Linux distributions in my full-time job)
- I could build something that easily impacts hundreds if not thousands of people.
Freelancing also gave me an opportunity to work directly with clients and share my product-oriented mindset. To be an effective problem solver, I learned to better understand the business goals, and help clients achieve them efficiently, even if it meant I make less because we ended up with a simpler solution 😃
Danial Ranjiha Founder @ Foretheta & Traindex.io
I climbed the ranks in Upwork over a few months and held and maintained a top-rated rank for a couple of years. I had the opportunity to work on a lot of great projects and with great clients, one of whom turned into my next full-time role :)
August 2018
Founding Engineer @ Tempo
It started as another Upwork project, a US startup based in Silicon Valley was looking for an experienced Backend engineer to help build their system. The CEO (Moawia) reached out over Upwork and we hit it off cause he was a fellow Egyptian, and the CTO (Josh) was a versatile engineer across the full stack, with a bias towards action and delivery.
Tempo (Pivot at the time) was building a very unique product in an area I had no exposure to before that time. They took Xbox’s stereo camera (Kinect) and built a system where people could work out in front of it, and it’d offer them feedback in real-time, similar to how a personal trainer would! So if you're doing a Bicep curl for example with a heavyweight, and you end up leaning backward, It’d prompt you to adjust your form or lower the weight.
Tempo had a mission to improve people's lives from day one, which I personally connected with, given how challenging it was to prioritize my health at the time, with work and other commitments at the time.
We worked together part-time for about 8 months. We found that despite:
- the timezone difference (8+ hours between Egypt and the US)
- the language difference (My main language is Arabic, but my English was decent at the time 😀)
- the geographical difference (a 15+ hour flight, we never met in person till years later)
Things worked out quite well! So I moved to work with them full time, and we started growing the team in Egypt 🎉 We hired more engineers, got an office, moved into a bigger office, and nearly 4 years later, Tempo had:
Funding Raised Series D
Completed workouts
By over 10k users
Employees 100+ in Egypt, which I’m really proud of!
Over the next five years, my role changed quite a bit, I got to experience the company growing from an early-stage startup to a series D company (Covid really helped accelerate that, lucky us… Or not so lucky? 🤔), and my role was always about where I can add the most value, some highlights were:
- Building our first e-commerce pipeline that charged our first few thousand orders? Check ✅
- Building our first analytics report and data pipeline based on user behavior? Check ✅
- Pushing a critical bug into production that cost us over 10k in lost revenue in less than an hour? That was my lucky contribution as well 😂 (happy to tell you all about it another time!)
Arad Margalit Engineering Manager
I also oscillated between doing deep IC work, and managing a team of up to 5 engineers at different points in my tenure, and had an opportunity to collaborate with a lot of different stakeholders from Analytics, Accounting, Operations, Content, etc…
Taryn Dukellis Director of Analytics
Anna Kacius Director of Operations
Before I left in 2023, I was a staff Software engineer, and the tech lead for one of 2 main product groups at Tempo, called top-of-funnel, which was responsible for:
- How the user finds out about us (Marketing)
- How we craft our story to convert users (our main website)
- How we enable users to buy things from us (our e-commerce integrations, including supply chain)
- Their first few weeks into using our products (onboarding)
I had an opportunity to work under great mentors and collaborate with excellent colleagues during my time at Tempo, as well as help in offering lots of opportunities in Egypt to work on this mission as well, and I'll always cherish that ❤️ Tempo was a big part of my life during those 5 years, and I’d not have chosen to leave unless it was for something as special (or even more), as you’ll see 😀
Haider Sabri Former head of Engineering @ Uber Eats
July 2023
Staff Software Engineer @ Cur8 Capital
It all started with a simple LinkedIn message. The head of engineering at Islamic Finance Guru (Shuaib) reached out introducing the company, and asking if I’d be interested in a Staff Software Engineer position.
This was my first time hearing about Islamic finance, It’s something you’d not hear about in Egypt (Very unfortunate, given it’s a Muslim company). This is a particularly challenging field for Muslims given our religion has guidelines on what's permissible to invest your money in (interest is not permissible for example), and evaluating whether certain opportunities are sound financially and religiously requires expertise on both ends, which was a hard combination to find in Egypt.
After years of trying to figure out this space, I couldn't, which meant that I had no idea how to invest and grow whatever small amount of money I saved up, so it just ended up sat in a current bank account (to not accrue interest), or somewhere in my house (won't tell you exactly where 😛). Turns out I'm the exact target audience for the UK-based company: Islamic Finance Guru.
The company started as a blog back in 2014, explaining key concepts in Islamic finance, and has since grown to be one of the UK (and the world’s) largest Islamic finance sites, reaching millions of readers every month. It also offers an investment platform, Cur8 Capital, where it offers Sharia Compliant deals in different asset classes (Fixed Income, Real Estate, VC, etc…)
I’m currently the tech lead for one of the 2 cross-functional engineering teams we have, mostly focused on building the operations of the investment platform and streamlining our internal processes to facilitate scaling our assets under management and improving the investor experience.
Very excited to see how far we can take this in shaa Allah 😃