Head of Engineering

I started on Nisnass, Al Tayer's mid-market fashion play, which was underperforming with conversion at 0.2%.

Lift conversion fast enough to justify the brand's existence.

Improved mobile compatibility, released the Android app, rebuilt the cart and checkout experience, and integrated Fredhopper to do visual merchandising properly.

Conversion from 0.2% to 0.8% in seven months. When Covid hit, the group consolidated everything into Ounass, and I moved with it.

Checkout pages took over 5 seconds each, at exactly the moment customers are most ready to leave.

Make checkout fast without risking order integrity.

Moved checkout out of Magento entirely, keeping Magento only for final order value validation at the last step.

Checkout pages at 450 ms, an order flow customers stopped abandoning out of impatience.

A new Saudi warehouse could only pay off if delivery promises matched local expectations.

Make fast delivery work across a multi-warehouse, multi-country network.

Built a split shipment module that divides an order across warehouses in the background at the moment of purchase, and migrated to a new payment provider with high availability and proper Saudi market support.

3-hour delivery in warehouse cities, clean handling of cross-warehouse and cross-country shipments, and a kick-started Saudi business.

BNPL was unproven in the region, and no large platform had committed to it.

Be the first among the big Middle East ecommerce players to offer it.

Implemented buy now, pay later end-to-end.

Conversion up 28%.

The mobile app converted at 0.9%, far below what the traffic deserved.

Make the app the best-converting surface we've had.

Ran a sustained program of improvements across the app experience, from performance to merchandising to checkout.

App conversion above 4%.

Leadership wanted certainty that technology would never be the reason for stalled growth.

Map exactly what had to change for the platform to handle several times the current revenue without technical obstacles.

Led extended research across the stack and delivered a concrete action plan, alongside a dedicated 4-developer team working down technical debt day in, day out.

A platform and a plan that growth could not outrun, with technical debt handled as a discipline instead of a backlog wish.

Hiring only from the UAE talent pool put a hard ceiling on engineering capacity.

Grow the team past what the local market could supply.

Opened engineering offices in Turkey, Ukraine, and Sri Lanka and built the hiring machine to staff them.

18 to 53 engineers, with talent access no longer limiting the roadmap.