Engineering Manager / Principal Engineer

Karim Haddad

Buildingresilientsystems,

Curatingelegantsolutions

A Munich-based engineering leader specializing in distributed systems, AI-enabled platforms, and observability. Scaling teams that own outcomes, not chaos.

Impact at a glance

0%reduction in production incidents

0msAPI latency from 2s

0B+records managed

0engineers led

Impact translated

The numbers are backed by operating systems, not one-off wins.

AI/OCR business automation

0%

Manual handling reduced

Automated accounting workflows with AI and OCR pipelines, replacing manual invoice entry for accounting operations.

0506

Systems story

One operating model, four connected disciplines.

Select a discipline to see how leadership, architecture, AI, and operations reinforce each other instead of living as separate resume bullets.

4 platform teams - 21 engineers

Leadership System

Built ownership models, feedback loops, engineering levels, and career frameworks while staying close to architecture and delivery.

1:1s and growth feedback
Promotion criteria
End-to-end team ownership

Experience

From deeply hands-on engineer to organizational technical leader.

Directed four platform teams while personally building major backend parts of the Email and AI Assistant platforms.

Owned engineering strategy, architecture, and day-to-day execution across Enterprise Email & Automation, AI Gateway, LiveChat, and My Organization.
Reduced production incidents by roughly 85% with observability, proactive alerting, release gates, and postmortems.
Scaled email automation to several hundred thousand emails monthly over a 3B+ record database.
Automated accounting workflows using AI/OCR pipelines, reducing manual handling by 40%.
Interviewed 130+ candidates and coached 10 engineers into expanded roles including team leads and staff tracks.

Capability map

Skills are organized by the outcomes they support.

Five clusters of technology and leadership practice, each tied to real delivery evidence.

01Cluster

Leadership

Led 21 engineers across 4 teams, standardized levels, ran feedback loops, and coached engineers into expanded roles.

Engineering ManagementOrg ScalingHiringCoachingStaff IC Leadership

02Cluster

Distributed Systems

Scaled realtime and communication systems, reduced latency to 40ms, and decomposed monoliths into owned services.

MicroservicesEvent-Driven ArchitectureRealtime SystemsRabbitMQRedis

03Cluster

Backend

Built major backend parts of Email, AI Assistant, livestream workflows, and workflow-oriented SaaS products.

LaravelNestJSTypeScriptNode.jsPythonGolangPHP

04Cluster

Data & AI

Managed 3B+ records and shipped AI/OCR automation that reduced manual accounting work by 40%.

PostgreSQLMySQLMongoDBElasticsearchVector SearchOCR

05Cluster

Cloud & Ops

Introduced observability and release governance that reduced production incidents by roughly 85%.

DockerKubernetesAWS Elastic BeanstalkCI/CDOpenTelemetryGrafana

Contact

Munich-based engineering leader, ready for EU roles without visa friction.

Best fit: staff-plus engineering, platform leadership, distributed systems, AI-enabled products, and teams that need stronger execution loops.

Direct contactStart a focused conversation

Share the role scope, platform context, and what success should look like in the first two quarters.

Email Karim

LocationMunich, Germany

EU-ready employment setup and flexible collaboration across European teams.

FocusPlatform, AI, operations

Most useful where architecture, reliability, and team ownership intersect.

EducationBSc Software Engineering

Damascus University

CertificationsNestJS - AWS Elastic Beanstalk

Coursera and LinkedIn Learning credentials.

Programming contestACM-ICPC award

3rd Place and Fastest Solution Award, 2013.

LanguagesArabic - English C1

Native Arabic and professional English communication.