Head of IT Development ·HSA Group ·Dubai
KhaledSameerخالد سمير

I lead the product and technology team at Stoneslane, an HSA Group company in Dubai. I hired the team from zero, and we replaced a licensed white-label ordering app with our own platform.
- In software
- since 2014
- Leading teams
- since 2021
- Domains
- B2B commerce, payments, ERP
- Languages
- Arabic and English
Case files
The hard calls
Four cases, each told as the problem, the decision, what I did as the lead, and what changed.
- Case 01From licensed to owned: the Masdary cut-overI made the build-vs-buy case to management for dropping the white-label ordering app, then ran the cut-over to our in-house app. It moved nearly all orders and ended the license.Read the case
- Case 02Built for good networks, shipped to bad onesProduction showed Aden’s slow, lossy links stalling catalog sync and checkout. I led the diagnosis and the redesign: link-aware deadlines, retries behind circuit breakers, a resumable change feed for the catalog and one idempotency key per order.Read the case
- Case 03Built to split: a modular monolith for the HSA super appA customer app and a field app for pickers and couriers on one TypeScript codebase that runs as separate roles on AWS ECS Fargate. Modules own their data, kill switches replace emergency deploys, and every alarm links to a runbook. Production-ready and in canary testing.Read the case
- Case 04Checkout for businesses that buy on creditActing lead of the core team that owned payments, checkout, orders, credit and wallet. We integrated Amazon Payment Services, Checkout.com and Al Etihad Credit Bureau.Write-up in progress
Operating manual
Five rules I lead by
Each rule comes with the place it was tested.
- Rule 01
Hire on real work, not puzzles.
In practiceI wrote the take-home tests, a Flutter delivery planner and an Odoo mobile API, and ran the hiring for every role on the product and technology team. The first engineer started in Oct 2025, and no one has left.
- Rule 02
Build or buy is a business case, not a preference.
In practiceI made the case to management for dropping Masdary’s white-label app, then ran the cut-over to our own app until the license ended.
- Rule 03
Choose vendors by comparison, then own the rollout.
In practiceI chose Supy for restaurant inventory and ran its rollout, and picked Gameball for group loyalty after comparing vendors. Loyalty is launching early 2027.
- Rule 04
Design for the bad day before launch day.
In practiceThe super app is designed with kill switches, circuit breakers and alarms linked to runbooks. Masdary retries behind a circuit breaker and uses idempotency keys, so a retried order is never placed twice.
- Rule 05
AI in the workflow, guardrails in the pipeline.
In practiceThe team works with Claude Code: review agents, shared skills, hooks that block pushes to main and edits to migrations, and CI that runs mutation tests and traces spec rules to tests.
Career
Since 2014, drawn to scale
Bars start and end on the real month, under the official titles. Hatching marks the time I led a team.
Head of IT Development
Stoneslane (HSA Group)
Jun 2026 – Present
Lead the product and technology team. Masdary, the group super app, the group ERP.
- Sep 2026 Cut-over complete
Senior Software Engineer
Stoneslane (HSA Group)
Sep 2023 – Jun 2026
Developed the Odoo ERP alone, then hired the team. Architect and product owner of the Masdary app.
- Oct 2025 First hire
- Apr 2026 App Store release
Senior Full Stack Developer (acting Team Lead)
Tradeling
May 2021 – Sep 2023
Led the core team for payments, checkout, orders, credit and wallet.
Senior Full Stack Web Developer
MBC Group
Aug 2018 – May 2021
Internal applications for MBC staff, on .NET Core, Angular and SQL Server.
Software Engineer
General Authority for Youth & Sports
Feb 2017 – Aug 2018
Moved the authority’s services from paper to online.
Software Developer
Electronic Spaces
Jun 2014 – Feb 2017
Time-attendance software with fingerprint readers and access control.
Open source
Shipped in the open
Rust, Python and Flutter packages, published on crates.io, PyPI and pub.dev.
greplm
Rust · crates.ioA local code index for LLM coding agents. A CLI and MCP server that answers search, call-graph, go-to-definition and git queries, so an agent reads only the code it needs.
github.com: greplmamt-phonetic
Rust · crates.io · PyPIMohammedمحمد
Phonetic name matching across Latin and Arabic scripts, with no transliteration step. Built for name deduplication and as a prefilter for fuzzy search.
github.com: amt-phoneticfast_thumbhash
Flutter · pub.devThumbHash image placeholders for Flutter, extracted from the Masdary app and published on pub.dev.
pub.dev: fast_thumbhashcncnet-server
Rust · Docker · AWSA Rust rewrite of the CnCNet tunnel server that relays multiplayer traffic for Red Alert 2: a lock-free UDP relay with STUN, rate limits and Prometheus metrics.
github.com: cncnet-server
Contact
Contact
Get in touch.
Email reaches me fastest. I am also on LinkedIn and GitHub.