Mostafa Zaher

Mostafa Zaher, Engineering Leader

15+ years building high-performing engineering teams and products across startups, scale-ups, and public companies, from finding product-market fit to going public. Led multi-disciplinary squads of backend, frontend, testing, algorithms engineers, and data scientists.

I enjoy traveling ✈️, sports ⚽️, listening to music 🎵, watching movies 🎥, and occasionally playing video games 🎮.

You can find a list of my favorite (technical and non-technical) books at Books 📚.

Experience

Breadfast

Senior Engineering Manager, Shopping & Growth Jan 2024 – Present

YC-backed Egyptian quick-commerce company delivering groceries in under 60 minutes. Raised $86M+ through Series B at a $400M valuation, scaling to 1,900+ employees.

Leading the Shopping and Growth engineering teams, setting technical strategy and building scalable systems for one of the region's fastest-growing delivery platforms. Drove architectural decisions that enabled the company to sustain hyper-growth while maintaining reliability.

Clipboard Health

Staff Engineer Jan 2023 – Dec 2023

YC W17 healthcare staffing marketplace valued at $1.3B (Sequoia-led Series C). Raised $90M+, serving 5,000+ facilities across 30+ US cities with 600+ employees.

Contributed to the core marketplace platform connecting healthcare professionals with facilities for on-demand shift work. Worked on backend systems that powered matching, scheduling, and real-time availability across a rapidly scaling two-sided marketplace.

Swvl

Senior Engineering Manager, Marketplace & R&D Sep 2019 – Dec 2022

Egyptian mass-transit tech company (NASDAQ: SWVL via SPAC IPO). Scaled from a regional ride-sharing startup to a global platform operating across 6 countries with 1,000+ employees.

Built and led an engineering organization of 70+ engineers and 5 Engineering Managers across 10 teams, guiding the company through its SPAC IPO on NASDAQ. Owned the technical strategy for the highest-impact systems — Search, Dynamic Pricing, Dynamic Routing, Supply Planning, Dispatcher, and ETA. Scaled the org 3x in 2 years while maintaining an eNPS of +25. Championed Swvl's first US patent filing, first published research paper, and multiple open-source projects.

Cognitev

Team Lead, Backend & Senior Software Engineer Jan 2018 – Sep 2019

Egyptian AI-powered martech startup with offices in Cairo and Dubai. Raised $1.7M in seed funding, reached profitability in 2017, and served Fortune 500 clients across 22 countries.

Led the backend engineering team building machine-learning-driven ad-tech products. Architected the core platform that powered automated programmatic advertising and audience targeting, bridging data science models with production-grade systems.

Affectiva

Software Engineer Oct 2013 – Jan 2018

MIT Media Lab spinoff (2009) and one of the earliest leaders in Emotion AI, pioneering the space a decade before it became mainstream. Raised $53M+ over 10 rounds, acquired by Smart Eye (Nasdaq: SEYE) for $73.5M in 2021.

Built features for the web portal, RESTful API, and Android SDK for emotion-recognition products. Managed services across multiple AWS accounts and worked on data lake indexing using Presto, Hive, and Redshift, contributing to products used by 70% of the world's largest advertisers.