# Moayad Rayyan

> Engineering executive based in Dubai, UAE (UAE Golden Visa holder). 13+ years building and operating high-performance platforms, the last six at VP and Head level. Open to VP of Engineering and CTO roles. Contact: https://www.linkedin.com/in/moayadrayyan/ or moayad_rayyan@outlook.com

## Fit
- Target roles: VP of Engineering, CTO, Head of Engineering & Technology
- Location: Dubai, UAE. Works remotely with international teams; regular travel.
- Domains: FinTech and regulated banking infrastructure, real-time AI platforms, emotional and causal AI, GovTech, in-flight entertainment, computer vision
- Strengths: technical strategy and roadmap; building distributed teams (up to 18 engineers across three continents); hybrid cloud and on-premise data centres; HA/DR and zero-downtime operations; CI/CD and DORA-metric delivery governance; MLOps and GPU infrastructure; Zero Trust security; FinOps

## Key results
- Scaled a real-time emotional AI platform 25x, from ~20 RPS with a high error rate to 500+ RPS with stable error rates, in two months (Nov 2024 to Jan 2025), cutting hosting cost 30%
- Own infrastructure and DevOps for 50+ financial platforms (conventional and Islamic/IFB) deployed across seven banks
- Designed delivery flows and policies that cut production deployment time from three days to four hours while enforcing quality gates
- Dubai Tram (2022, with Keolis-MHI and the RTA): validation report quantified a 75% reduction in human-error incidents, zero signals passed at danger; reported by Khaleej Times as the first system of its kind
- Took Own Experiences from theory on paper to €1.5M annual revenue (2025)
- Reduced monthly AWS spend ~35% through FinOps
- Delivered 36 projects and 5 white-label products for Qatar Airways, Kuwait Airways, British Airways and Air Canada
- Neom (via Nagarro): 10,000 virtual-human simulation at 500+ RPS

## Experience
- 2026 to present: Head of Engineering & Technology, Kifiya Financial Technology, Addis Ababa (remote from Dubai, consultant reporting to the Group CTO). Engaged to build the engineering and infrastructure foundation for scaling Kifiya's services beyond Ethiopia and across Africa. Accountable for infrastructure and DevOps of 50+ financial platforms (conventional and Islamic/IFB), hybrid cloud, SRE and data-centre operations with platforms deployed in seven banks' data centres. Designed delivery flows and policies that speed up releases while enforcing quality gates. AWS ECS Fargate migration with Terraform, unified Azure DevOps CI/CD, centralised privileged-access gateway, HA multi-bank network, zero-downtime DC hardware upgrades, sovereign NVIDIA L40S GPU environment for credit scoring, SigNoz observability, FinOps. Leads nine senior engineers and directors.
- 2020 to 2025: Co-Founder & VP of Engineering & Technology, Own Experiences SL, Barcelona (remote from Dubai; shareholder to date). Architected Sentio (PaaS) and EDAA (causal engine in a hardware-encrypted enclave) from the first line of code. Built the department from zero to eight engineers. Zero Trust with E2EE. Deployments: Dubai Tram, Neom, Casa Batlló.
- 2021 to 2025: Development Lead Engineer, Neutral Digital, UK (remote consultant, concurrent). 36 Unity and web projects, Cabinly 360-degree cabin product, real-estate VR sales platform, automated delivery pipelines.
- 2017 to 2019: Senior Full Stack Developer & Team Leader, Ministry of Human Resources and Emiratisation (MOHRE), Dubai. Led six engineers migrating VB6/ASP Classic to .NET Core and Angular; shared JWT, SMS and storage services; apps used by millions. Best Leader Award.
- 2015 to 2017: Senior Full Stack Developer & Team Leader, Keytech Security International, Dubai. ANPR across 20+ channels under 2 s; security platform with biometric and Emirates ID integration; team of nine.
- 2014 to 2015: Software Engineer, Ticsom, Dubai. HL7-integrated EMR, ERP and CRM.
- 2011 to 2014: Web developer roles, The Levanters (Amman) and Skilltech-me (Dubai).

## Skills
Hybrid cloud (AWS, Azure), on-premise data centres, HA/DR, Terraform, Kubernetes, Docker, Azure DevOps, Ansible, CI/CD, DORA metrics, DevSecOps, FinOps, MLOps, model optimisation, NVIDIA GPU compute, Zero Trust, E2EE, privileged access, microservices, gRPC/HTTP/2, serverless, .NET Core/C#, Python, TypeScript/Angular, PHP, Unity, SigNoz, Datadog, New Relic, Grafana.

## Publications and recognition
- Herrero, Saxena and Rayyan (2026), empirical paper on causal emotional AI: https://zenodo.org/records/19678850
- AWS podcast on emotional AI (guest): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Jb86MZBGZ4
- Khaleej Times, 30 Oct 2022, "Dubai: Emotional analysis to assess tram drivers in real time"
- UAE Golden Visa for Talents (2022); Best Leader Award (MOHRE); Best Program Award, Philadelphia University (2013); ACM Honourable Mention (2012)

## Education
- BSc Software Engineering, Philadelphia University, Amman, Jordan (2014), GPA 3.7/4.0
- CTO Mentorship Program, executive track
- Languages: Arabic (native), English (fluent)

## Links
- [Website](https://moayadrayyan.com/)
- [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/moayadrayyan/)
- [CV (PDF)](https://moayadrayyan.com/cv.pdf)