Riyadh, Saudi Arabia

Mohammad Al Ali

Technical Team Lead

I lead engineering teams building the platforms that move money, food, and data at national scale in Saudi Arabia.

View work Get in touch

01 About

Hands-on at every level

I have spent the last four years leading engineering teams, and I still read the design documents and sit in the code reviews. My work runs across Java and Spring, Kubernetes, and event-driven systems — from core wallet services at STC Pay to the integration landscape of a sovereign wealth fund.

I am equally comfortable defining architecture standards for an organization of that size and pairing with an engineer on a stubborn bug. I studied Computer Science at Imam Muhammad Ibn Saud University, graduating first in my class with a GPA of 4.97 out of 5.

02 Experience

Where the work happened

Newest first. Open an entry for detail.

  1. 2024 — Present

    Technical Team Lead

    PIF Public Investment Fund Own the end-to-end architecture of the integration landscape, and lead the team that builds it.
    • Lead 8 engineers — technical direction, delivery commitments, mentoring, and code review.
    • Own the architecture of the PIF integration landscape, defining the integration patterns and standards used by applications supporting investment operations and portfolio companies.
    • Led the migration from Apigee Edge on-premise to Apigee X on cloud: target architecture, migration strategy, and cutover plan, with no disruption to live integrations.
    • Interviewed candidates, hired 5 engineers onto the team, and onboarded them onto the integration platform.
    • Introduced DevOps practices, CI/CD pipelines, and quality gates across the platform.
    • Plan the roadmap with product and business stakeholders: break down complex initiatives, surface delivery risks early, and communicate mitigation plans.
    • Delivered integrations across SWIFT, Simcorp, Oracle ERP (EBS and Fusion), Microsoft Dynamics, ServiceNow, SharePoint, WSO2 CIAM, Cisco ISE, ADFS, Webex, and Azure Speech-to-Text.
    • Apigee X
    • Java
    • Spring Boot
    • Kubernetes
    • Google Cloud
    • CI/CD
    • SWIFT
    • Oracle ERP
  2. 2021 — 2024

    Technical Team Lead prev. Senior Software Engineer

    STC Pay now STC Bank Built and owned core platform services for Saudi Arabia's largest digital wallet, serving millions of customers.
    • Led a team of 3 engineers owning core platform services — accountable for technical decisions, quality practices, and on-time delivery.
    • Redesigned the API gateway around Spring Cloud Gateway, cutting custom development effort by 95% and standardizing how services were exposed.
    • Architected and built a distributed rate limiting engine on Redis, handling millions of requests a day and shielding downstream payment services.
    • Led the gateway's database migration from MongoDB to PostgreSQL, weighing the trade-offs and materially reducing infrastructure cost.
    • Led the marketplace product end to end: microservice boundaries, inter-service communication, and data ownership, with product, design, and QA in a Scrum setup.
    • Defined system architecture and technical direction, producing design documents and integration specifications for service communication, security, and data management.
    • Grew engineers through mentoring, pairing on hard problems, and structured code review; interviewed candidates and hired 3 engineers.
    • Drove engineering practice: automated testing with Testcontainers, GitLab CI/CD, containerized delivery on Kubernetes and OpenShift, and production observability.
    • Spring Boot
    • Spring Cloud Gateway
    • OAuth2
    • Kafka
    • RabbitMQ
    • Redis
    • PostgreSQL
    • Elasticsearch
    • Keycloak
    • OpenShift
  3. 2021 — 2023

    Technical Co-founder

    Monasabh Co-founded the company and owned the entire technical function, from strategy to launch.
    • Owned technical strategy, architecture, and execution across mobile, web, and backend.
    • Hired, onboarded, and managed the development team, setting priorities and delivery cadence from concept to production launch.
    • Designed and built the backend in Java and Spring Boot: API contracts, data models, and integration patterns, including payments and notifications.
    • Operated under startup constraints — rapid iteration, frequent re-prioritization, and shipping on tight timelines.
    • Java
    • Spring Boot
    • REST APIs
    • Payments
    • Notifications
  4. 2019 — 2021

    Lead Android Developer

    Jahez Led Android across three customer-facing apps at one of Saudi Arabia's largest food delivery platforms.
    • Led the Android team, delivering features across three customer-facing applications at high traffic and high release frequency.
    • Owned release cycles, code review standards, and technical decisions, meeting aggressive timelines in a fast-scaling startup.
    • Designed and implemented multi-layered application security: code obfuscation with ProGuard and R8, root detection with countermeasures against bypass tools, and Google SafetyNet Attestation for device integrity — protecting the ordering and payment flow from abuse.
    • Android
    • ProGuard / R8
    • SafetyNet
    • Mobile security
  5. 2015 — 2019

    Software Developer

    Freelance Independent client work, from requirements through to release.

03 Projects

Built from scratch

Side projects, built to understand the layer underneath the one I work on.

  • AI Coding Assistant IDE Plugin

    A JetBrains plugin with code completion, an AI chat interface, and task automation. A Golang language server indexes the source tree and talks to backend services over gRPC.

    • Golang
    • gRPC
    • JetBrains SDK
    • GPT-4o
    • Claude
    • Ollama

  • Container Runtime from Scratch

    A container runtime in Golang built directly on Linux namespaces and cgroups. It pulls OCI images from registries and assembles copy-on-write layered filesystems.

    • Golang
    • namespaces
    • cgroups
    • OCI images
    • copy-on-write FS

  • Programming Language & Virtual Machine

    An object-oriented programming language written from scratch in C. The compiler emits bytecode for a stack-based virtual machine built alongside it.

    • C
    • bytecode compiler
    • stack-based VM

More on GitHub

04 Skills

Tools and certifications

Leadership

  • Team leadership
  • Technical direction
  • Hiring & technical interviewing
  • Coaching & mentoring
  • Roadmap planning
  • Agile (Scrum / Kanban)

Backend & architecture

  • Java
  • Spring Boot
  • Spring Cloud
  • Microservices
  • Event-driven architecture
  • Kafka
  • RabbitMQ
  • Redis
  • PostgreSQL
  • Elasticsearch
  • API design
  • OAuth2

Platform & cloud

  • Kubernetes
  • Docker
  • Google Cloud
  • CI/CD
  • GitOps
  • Observability

Other languages

  • Golang
  • Python
  • Node.js

Certifications

  • Google Cloud Professional Cloud Architect 12 / 2023
  • Google Cloud Associate Cloud Engineer 12 / 2023
  • Certified Kubernetes Administrator CKA 09 / 2023
  • Certified Kubernetes Application Developer CKAD 04 / 2022
  • Confluent Certified Developer for Apache Kafka 04 / 2022
  • Redis Certified Developer 12 / 2021

05 Content

I teach what I run in production

Technical courses and walkthroughs on YouTube — in depth, not in summary.

  • Software Architecture: The Hard Parts

    A walkthrough of the book — decomposition, distributed data, and the trade-offs behind each decision.

  • Containers & Kubernetes Fundamentals

    How a container actually works — namespaces, cgroups, images — and then Kubernetes on top of it.

  • The Transactional Outbox Pattern

    Reliable messaging between services, using Kafka, Kafka Connect, and Debezium for change data capture.

  • Real-Time Systems at Scale

    Scalable real-time applications with WebSockets, Server-Sent Events, and Redis Pub/Sub.

Visit the channel

06 Achievements

Recognition

  • 2019 Best Live Demo Award Zayed University, Dubai
  • 2019 2nd Place — Programming Jam 5.0 Saudi Arabia
  • 2019 3rd Place, Extended Round — Google Hash Code Saudi Arabia · 5th online
  • 2019 Best Graduation Project Imam Muhammad Ibn Saud University
  • 2014 — 2019 First in Class College of Computer Science, Imam University

07 Contact

Get in touch

Email is the fastest way to reach me. Anything specific gets a reply.

Download CV