Senior Engineering Leader
Hi, I'm Omar Ali
Director / VP of Engineering / CTO
I build and scale distributed engineering organizations across Europe, the Middle East, Asia and Australia. Currently stewarding core platforms and tokenization at Deutsche Bank / DWS.
- 0 Engineering org led
- 0 eNPS above average
- 0 Years in tech
- 0 Leaders grown
- 0 Regions led
About
Engineering leadership, end to end
I've spent 25+ years in engineering, the last decade of it leading organizations rather than codebases. My strengths are engineering org design, scaling and cross-region team leadership, hiring and bar-raising, M&A technical integration, and platform strategy, with a consistent record of strong team health and above-average eNPS.
That track record spans finance, e-commerce, food delivery, social media, advertising, and blockchain: institutional digital asset custody at Deutsche Bank, platform leadership at Delivery Hero and HelloFresh. I go deep in regulated fintech: blockchain and tokenization, MiCA/BaFin/AML compliance, and company-wide GraphQL API standards, on a hands-on background across Java, Go, Python, Ruby, Node.js and PHP, on AWS, GCP and on-prem.
Executive engineering roles across six companies, 200+ interviews conducted, 80+ engineers hired, and 10+ former direct reports since promoted into Director, Head-of and VP roles.
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Org Design & Scaling Built and led orgs of 14 to 60 engineers across four time zones.
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Regulated Fintech MiCA, BaFin, AML/AFC and data-residency controls built into architecture.
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Platform Strategy Company-wide API standards, monolith-to-microservices cutovers, M&A integration.
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Hiring & Bar Raising 200+ interviews, 80+ hires, competency-based appraisal and pay grades.
Experience
Professional journey
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Senior Technology Manager, Director
Deutsche Bank / DWS Core Platforms Berlin / Frankfurt, Germany
Jan 2026 - Present
- Took ownership of DWS's core technology stack (SimCorp Dimension and Aladdin) by leading the Core Platforms squads, having been brought in to steward the asset-management platform foundation.
- Shaped DWS's new tokenization platform from the ground up by serving as Blockchain Tech Lead across its early architecture.
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Director - Digital Asset Custody
Deutsche Bank Berlin / Frankfurt, Germany
Oct 2023 - Dec 2025
- Launched the bank's first MiCA-ready blockchain platform under BaFin supervision by building and leading a 40-engineer team across Germany, the UK, and India.
- Made the platform production-ready by architecting and coordinating 20+ internal integrations into payment, custody, compliance, and core-banking systems.
- Kept the platform compliant with security, AML/AFC, data-privacy, and data-residency rules by embedding those controls directly into the architecture under financial-services oversight.
- Supported banking operations across multiple geographies by establishing secure, scalable system architectures suited to enterprise-grade demands.
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Director - Engagement Alliance
HelloFresh Berlin, Germany
Feb 2023 - Aug 2023
- Kept Recipe Engagement and Personalization shipping across HelloFresh's global brand portfolio by leading a 60-engineer alliance after taking over the engagement platform.
- Improved delivery throughput by running an organization optimization that made the alliance leaner and faster to ship.
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Director - Vendor Supply Chain
Delivery Hero Berlin, Germany
Apr 2021 - Jan 2023
- Built a EUR 5M GMV Restaurant Supply Chain business serving foodpanda, PedidosYa, Talabat, and Mjam by bootstrapping the product and organization from scratch.
- Took a new platform from zero to kickoff within three months by drafting the technical roadmap and system designs on arrival.
- Recruited 80+ engineers across Delivery Hero by serving as bar raiser and hiring manager across 200+ interviews while scaling the organization.
- Set the GraphQL standard adopted across Delivery Hero brands by co-authoring the company-wide API Guidelines.
- Raised the bar on technical guidelines, cross-squad collaboration, hiring, and onboarding by introducing company-wide changes as a cross-company bar raiser.
- Scored 60+ points above the company-average eNPS by investing heavily in team health and culture while leading a newly formed org.
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VP of Engineering
Jodel Berlin, Germany
Apr 2020 - Mar 2021
- Led engineering for Jodel's hyperlocal social network as VP of Engineering, owning platform delivery, reliability, and team leadership.
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CTO
EatFirst Berlin, Germany
Apr 2019 - Apr 2020
- Consolidated three acquired companies onto a unified platform in under 12 months by running the pre- and post-acquisition technical integration as CTO through the M&A.
- Kept delivery moving across four time zones by directly managing a 16-engineer team spanning Australia, Lithuania, Germany, and Egypt.
- Stood up a new Egyptian engineering team in six weeks by running a focused hiring sprint to add local delivery capacity.
- Simplified post-M&A complexity by planning and supervising the migration of acquired platforms onto a shared stack.
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Lead Software Engineer
WeQ Global Berlin, Germany
Apr 2017 - Mar 2019
- Delivered 1B+ clicks per day at sub-50 ms p99 by building and scaling a distributed AdService to replace the legacy serving layer.
- Bought runway for the rebuild by maintaining and progressively refactoring a 50M-request/day PHP-on-MongoDB monolith.
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CTO
Eventtus Cairo, Egypt
Oct 2015 - Feb 2017
- Grew the technical team from 2 to 14 and scaled the company from 7 to 24 by rebuilding the hiring pipeline, introducing competency-based appraisals, and enforcing pay grades as incoming CTO.
- Reached 5x scalability at 75% of prior cost and powered conferences with 50k+ attendees by automating rolling deployments on AWS and cutting over from a monolith to microservices in Ruby, Node.js, and Go.
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CTO
OverC Studios Cairo, Egypt
Jul 2013 - Jan 2015
- Shipped multiple cross-platform mobile projects by designing the architecture and building a 14-person team to stand up the studio.
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Technology Manager
Raya Social Media Cairo, Egypt
Aug 2011 - Jun 2013
- Launched Egypt's first two social networks (OshareK and Nassya) by owning the technology end-to-end.
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Technology Manager
Damlag Cairo, Egypt
Jul 2010 - Jul 2011
- Architected the first offline/online movie ticketing system in Egypt, now selling 100K+ tickets per month.
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Development Team Lead
NTG - Egypt Development Center Cairo, Egypt
Apr 2009 - Jul 2010
- Maintained a portal serving 1M hits per minute and mentored a strong open source team.
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Lead Software Engineer
OpenCraft Cairo, Egypt
Mar 2006 - Mar 2009
- Delivered solutions based on Drupal, vTiger CRM and Apache Lucene by leading and mentoring a small team of engineers and designers.
- Shortened release cycles across client projects by building a continuous delivery pipeline for Drupal.
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Earlier roles
Software engineering Cairo, Egypt
2002 - 2006
Skills
Technical arsenal
Languages
Data & Streaming
Cloud & Platform
Domain
Leadership
Open Source
Two decades in the open
Ruby gems, GitHub projects, and Drupal modules and themes, published since 2006.
- 0 Gem downloads
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av v0.9.0
Programmable Ruby interface for FFMPEG/Libav
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paperclip-av-transcoder v0.6.4
Audio/Video Transcoder for Paperclip using FFMPEG/Avconv
1,690,649 -
uniqueness v1.1.0
Adds unique attribute support to ActiveModel models.
418,193
Work with me
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Engineering leadership, platform strategy and regulated fintech, packaged as advisory services, courses, live sessions and a newsletter.