Muktar Sayed Saleh
Engineering leader. I have built software for 24 years and led engineering teams since 2013.
I've been writing since 2002. Sometimes in languages machines read, sometimes in languages people do.
I work with founders and engineering teams as their engineering leader, building new teams or fixing and empowering existing ones. Get in touch
Currently
- VP of Engineering at a technology company since 2023, leading multiple engineering teams.
Two AI engineering certifications from Anthropic, and cloud certifications from AWS, Google Cloud and Alibaba Cloud.
Previously
- Director of Software Engineering Mercator.ai, Canada Employee #1. Led the product from idea to production, and contributed technically to securing funding rounds, the largest at $5.1M.
- Senior Software Engineering Manager AirAsia Led multiple engineering teams across airline products and the loyalty platform.
- Founder Monjz (2019) and Ayadi (2025) Two startups I founded and ran. They didn't succeed the way I'd hoped, but they taught me lessons about building a company that I still rely on.
- Software Engineering Manager GoQuo Led multiple engineering teams building a customer data platform (CDP) for airlines.
- Tech Lead SEEK Asia Led the Hirer platform team through the platform's modernization, and helped lead the migration of core services to AWS. SEEK Asia runs JobStreet and JobsDB.
- Tech Lead Tigerlab One of its first engineers. Led the technical build of the InsureTech cloud insurance platform.
- Development Team Lead SIST, Damascus Payment systems behind about 1,500 self-service bill-payment kiosks across Syria.
How I work with teams
- Founding technical partnership
- Working alongside early-stage founders as the technical half of the table: architecture, the first engineers, and the decisions that are expensive to reverse later.
- Leading an existing engineering team
- Taking responsibility for an engineering organization that already exists, and for what it ships.
- Ongoing technical advisory
- Staying alongside a team as a standing advisor: periodic architecture reviews, a frank second opinion on the hard decisions before they are made, and an experienced eye on what gets built as it is built.
Writing on engineering leadership
- ★ What We Delegate to AI Agents, and What We Never Will
- ★ Improving Software Engineering Practices in Our Early-Stage Startup
- ★ From 3 Hours 17 Minutes to 15 Seconds (Django test speedup)
- AWS just notified me that I owe $8,695,161.75
- Why Developers Should Perform Self Code Reviews Before Submitting PRs
Books
Technical books that were each the first of their kind in Arabic.
Selected work
- Miqwal
An influencer-marketing platform run entirely by AI, with no commission at all.
- Mercator.ai
Employee #1. Led the product from idea to production, and contributed technically to securing funding rounds, the largest at $5.1M.
- Edfa'li
Utility-bill kiosks: I built most of it, then hired its team and led delivery.
- AI contact center
Self-service AI telephony for a global vehicle-inspection company.
- Al-Faraheedy
An engine that scans the meter and rhyme of Arabic verse, named after al-Khalil ibn Ahmad al-Farahidi.
- Monjz
An Arabic marketplace for independent work, launched in 2019 and run for six years.
Poetry
Four Arab literary awards: the Sharjah Award for Arab Creativity (2011), the Imam University Award (2016), and the Dr. Souad Al-Sabah Award in two consecutive sessions (2017 and 2021).
Collections
- When Will My Exile End, O Winds?
- A Moon Over Mecca: Poems for Children
- He Now Crosses the Slopes of Song
- In the Depths of Love
And a rare idea, untouched,raises with me the poem's toastbetween eternity and ruin.She comes to me as I wish,and yields to me,while she refuses, and will not come, to a king. Contact
Engineering work, a question about a poem, or just a hello. I read and answer my own email, in either language.