About

I’m Mohammed Ali — Mo to most people I work with.

I’m a PMP-certified Technical Program Manager based in Dubai, UAE, currently at Sharjah Digital Department, where I lead technical programme management for AI orchestration, digital-government platforms, and enterprise integration initiatives. The flagship programme is the Digital Sharjah Assistant — evolving from a single conversational interface into a government-wide multi-agent AI orchestration layer connecting services across the Emirate.

My career has run through software engineering, AdTech, OTT monetization, and government AI delivery: Software → AdTech → Government AI. Twelve years of building and shipping complex technical systems, four of those building production AI. The through-line is constant: deliver hard technical programmes in environments where governance, coordination, and engineering all have to work simultaneously — and where the gap between a good slide deck and a working system is where most projects fail.

Background

RTA Dubai - AI & Digital Transformation / Project Manager (Jan 2023 – Dec 2025). Led delivery of AI-powered initiatives across the Roads & Transport Authority’s 2030 Smart Mobility programme. Designed and shipped a Retrieval-Augmented Generation knowledge platform integrating SharePoint, Weaviate, and Ollama 3.1 - improving internal document retrieval accuracy by ~40%. Built a multi-agent AI suite using LangGraph, CrewAI, Synthetic Kernel, and Agno (benchmarking, text-to-SQL BI, technical evaluation, eligibility orchestration). Established the AI Governance & Validation Framework aligned with Dubai Government AI ethics. Programmes I oversaw exceeded AED 30M in combined value, delivered hybrid Agile/Waterfall, with zero audit findings against DESC and RTA IT policy.

Setplex (New York) - Head of AVOD / AI & Backend Systems Lead (Oct 2023 – Dec 2025, concurrent with RTA). Built and shipped a CNN+LSTM commercial-detection engine deployed across 80+ live channels at 97% precision. Architected a distributed DSP and SSAI delivery stack handling 3M+ requests per second with sub-second latency, integrated with PubMatic, Aniview, and Kevel. Established CI/CD with model retraining pipelines, observability across Grafana/Prometheus, and SSAI optimisation through Broadpeak SmartLib (-35% ad-break latency).

Landvault (formerly Admix), London - Tech Lead (Sep 2019 – May 2023). Led modernisation of a high-traffic SSP serving 200K QPS at sub-300ms latency. Migrated a Java monolith into a TypeScript / Nest.js / React microservices stack, cutting infrastructure cost ~20% and lifting test coverage past 80%. Built the in-house DSP for campaign, creative, and targeting management.

Axadvisory, Dallas - Team Lead / Senior Software Engineer (Aug 2017 – Dec 2019). Oversaw 80+ projects across .NET / Power Platform / Dynamics 365. Built an AI deduplication engine in Azure Functions using fuzzy matching and entity resolution.

Teacharabia - Team Lead (Jul 2015 – Jun 2018). Designed and delivered multilingual education platforms in PHP / Yii / CodeIgniter and an Arabic OCR mobile app using OpenCV.

HIAST (Higher Institute for Applied Sciences and Technology) - Associate Professor (Jan 2014 – Jun 2021, ~7 years). Taught Introduction to AI, Algorithms & Data Structures, C++, Software Quality (TDD/BDD), and software engineering principles. Co-developed curricula and supervised capstone projects integrating ML and cloud components. Mentoring is something I still draw on every week.

What I do

The simplest description: I turn complex technical initiatives into structured, deliverable, measurable outcomes. Each part of that sentence carries weight.

Complex technical initiatives - the work I’m best at sits at the intersection of business stakeholders, technical teams, vendors, and executives. AI delivery, digital government, multi-agent orchestration, monetization technology - problems where technology, governance, and human coordination must all be solved simultaneously.

Structured - in regulated, multi-stakeholder environments, structure is what lets you move fast without breaking things. PMP-grounded, RAID-disciplined, governance-aware. But the documents are written so people actually read them, and the programs are run so people actually want to be on them.

Deliverable, measurable outcomes - everything else is talk.

How I work

I have a software engineering background - Node.js, NestJS, React, Python, FastAPI, .NET, microservices, AWS / Azure, AI / LLM / RAG / multi-agent systems. That depth means I can engage real technical conversations with engineers and vendors, evaluate solution designs critically, and recognise when a vendor’s slide deck is hiding something the demo doesn’t reveal.

I have project and program management discipline - PMP, Agile (Scrum, Kanban, XP, Lean), hybrid delivery, RAID, vendor and procurement coordination, governance, stakeholder alignment, business cases, executive communication, ROI and benefits realisation analysis.

The combination is the differentiator. Most technical project managers can’t engage substantively with engineers; most engineers can’t run governance on a complex program. I do both, and the work is better for it.

What I write about

I write for project leaders, technical program managers, and AI delivery teams who want to do this work seriously. The themes I keep returning to:

• Multi-agent AI orchestration and what it takes to deliver in regulated environments
• The honest reality of AI in project management - beyond the hype, beyond the “AI will replace PMs” headlines
• Technical Program Management as a craft - how to build, lead, and govern complex programs
• Government digital transformation in the GCC and what it takes to deliver at public-sector scale
• AdTech and OTT monetization technology - the unglamorous infrastructure work that determines whether platforms make money

I post to /writing/ when I have something worth saying. I don’t post to fill a content calendar.

Personal

I work in Arabic, English, and French, across UAE government and private-sector contexts. PMP-certified; Mendix Intermediate; Microsoft AI Product Manager (in progress). Outside the day job, I’m interested in AI tools that improve how organizations actually deliver - not the demos, the delivery - and I tinker with side projects in that direction.

Get in touch

If you’re working on a complex AI program, a public-sector digital transformation, an AdTech monetization challenge, or any kind of technically demanding delivery - and you want to compare notes, collaborate, or talk about a role - I’m always open to a thoughtful conversation. The fastest way to reach me is via LinkedIn or by email at the address on the contact page.