Technology Executive — Dubai, UAE

Adel K. Khalil

Chief Technology Officer with 20+ years building high-performance engineering organizations across EdTech, digital commerce, and healthcare platforms in MENA and global markets.

Over 20 years I have built and led engineering and product organizations at the center of MENA's most consequential technology companies, from Vezeeta's founding team through Delivery Hero's talabat expansion into q-commerce, to my current role as CTO at Almentor.

I have helped raise over $90M, led zero-downtime migrations of acquired platforms (Zomato, Carriage and Otlob), and most recently launched the first AI-powered skills platform in the Arabic-speaking world.

My work sits at the intersection of platform architecture, product strategy, and organization design, scaling teams from single digits to 400+ across multiple geographies, building engineering and product cultures that ship at scale without losing craft, and translating technology strategy into language that holds up in front of a board as well as an engineering all-hands.

Adel Khalil
Stealth AI Startup Aug 2022 – Present
Partner
Dubai, United Arab Emirates
Shindigg.com (acquired by Afton Tickets) 2011 – 2012
Senior Software Engineer
Seattle, WA, United States

Led development of a SaaS platform for event management covering ticketing, promotions, and venue operations.

Global Consulting Solutions 2009 – 2011
Technical Lead
Cairo, Egypt

Led design and delivery of a customized ERP platform for the automotive industry, serving Hyundai North America and Toyota Egypt.

SummitQwest 2007 – 2009
Software Engineer
New York, NY, United States

Engineered fleet control and dispatch systems supporting real-time tracking, routing, and service coordination.

DefendX 2003 – 2007
Software Engineer
Cairo, Egypt

Developed solutions for unstructured data management including NAS management, security, and billing systems across distributed, multi-OS environments.

Engineering Leadership & Org Design Hiring, competency frameworks, culture, management systems
Platform & Cloud Architecture AWS, microservices, domain extraction, multi-region resilience
AI Strategy & Implementation LLM products, agentic workflows, AI tutoring, build vs. buy
Site Reliability & Observability SRE practice setup, on-call culture, business & ops KPI alerting
EdTech & Skills Platforms Learning OS, adaptive content, LMS, government workforce programs
Digital Commerce & q-Commerce Marketplace systems, POS integration, fulfilment, vendor ops
Data Strategy & Analytics Modern data stack, event instrumentation, real-time BI
Healthtech & Regulated Platforms HIPAA-compliant EMR, booking systems, practice management SaaS
Payments & Fintech Infrastructure PSP integration, PCI-DSS, digital wallets, fraud detection
M&A Integration & Due Diligence Zero-downtime acquisition migrations, investor-grade tech readiness
Product Strategy & Board Communication Roadmapping, VC/PE data rooms, board presentations, OKRs
Telecom & Enterprise Partnerships Hard-bundling deals, API integrations, co-marketing programs
Developer Experience & DevOps CI/CD, internal platforms, deployment velocity, tech debt strategy
MENA & Emerging Market Expansion Multi-country rollouts, localization, frontier market org design
  • 07 No Rules Rules Reed Hastings & Erin Meyer
  • 08 Accelerate Forsgren, Humble & Kim
  • 09 The Power of Habit Charles Duhigg
  • 10 Working Backwards Colin Bryar & Bill Carr
  • 11 The Unicorn Project Gene Kim
  • 12 Peopleware DeMarco & Lister
  • 13 Monolith to Microservices Sam Newman
  • 14 Team Topologies Skelton & Pais
  • 15 Thinking, Fast and Slow Daniel Kahneman

Based in Dubai, UAE. Open to advisory engagements, board opportunities, and select speaking invitations.