Fireside Chats at KI labs; ep. 18
By: Wyatt Carr
Tags: Hiring, Diversity, Technology, Data, Startup

In this episode, we talk with our newly joined Data Engineering Lead, Ahmad Alhour, about his path from Jordan to Greece, and finally, to Munich!

Where did things start for you?

I was born in Amman Jordan, the middle east. So that’s a very big city, almost twice as big as Berlin. During my life growing up, Jordan was fairly peaceful. The oil and gas prices were impacted by the political issues around us but luckily we never had to worry about violence.

The bigger problem is how centralised the country is. About half the population lives in the capital city. The government is trying to change that by building universities in small cities so that cities can expand around the services demanded by the university.

I very much enjoy going back to visit family once or twice a year but each time I go back, I realise why I left in the first place.

How did you get into technology?

I fell in love with computers and programming when my dad bought a Pentium 1 PC around 2001–2002. I didn’t know what it was but I wanted to operate it. For my birthday, he gifted me Visual Basic Studio with a book on programming. I tried to hack a calculator and after messing around for a few months, I decided I wanted to be a programmer and it became my hobby. Graduating high school allowed me to immediately choose software engineering as an area of study.

In university I was approached by a few guys who were graduating about an idea for starting a social network; but in Arabic (this was right when Facebook was getting big). They asked me if I’d like to join them part time and I worked with them for a little bit over 2 years.

That’s where I actually learned software engineering professionally — which is much different than academic software engineering. I was very excited about visual programming and so getting into the web was sort of like a ‘dark art’ for me. I took electives in university to get better in that area so I could help the guys build the social network.

After graduating, I worked at a different startup for more than a year but then moved to Greece as an R&D Engineer for a large corporation, which was exciting. I definitely learned a lot but I learned that I wanted to do something solely with software. Then I moved to Germany.

Why did you choose Greece?

I didn’t really decide Greece as opposed to any other country. A recruiter offered me the opportunity and I saw it as a ticket into Europe. I talked with a few friends who told me Greece was a beautiful country from their holidays, so I was sold. Worst case, I’d just move back if I didn’t like it. Athens actually reminded me a lot of Amman. I expected something like London or Munich but it’s more southeastern European than Northwestern. Luckily, the food is amazing and the summers are fantastic.

How did you get to Germany?

I made the decision myself this time. The company in Athens wasn’t doing so well, and Greece as a country wasn’t either. Greece was considering leaving the EU and I had no interest in that. I wanted to move to Central Europe because tech was growing and that’s where my career could start developing. In Greece, the work atmosphere was more like, “hey let’s go to the beach, let’s grab a drink,” rather than working on an interesting project. There aren’t many Meetups or Conferences, and if there was any, it would be in Greek. I had to learn Greek as quick as possible because nearly everyone in the country (that I interacted with) spoke exclusively Greek; greek students only learn English if they take the class in secondary school as an elective.

Jordan is even much more English speaking than Greece. We learn English in primary school so everyone speaks it. There are many International companies in Amman too: Yahoo, Expedia, and Microsoft all have engineering offices. There are also different tech conferences, different open source community groups, etc. When I went to Athens, I expected an upgrade. This was the expectation of a European country. So, for my next move, I wanted my expectation to be met and Germany provided that.

How did web development turn in to data engineering?

In my previous company, my software engineering team wanted to build a report for a previous client. The client wanted to track reviews online to see if they were real or fraudulent. The technology “Spark” was recommended, and we decided to give it a try. We estimated 3 working days for it and I ended up spending two weeks on it. Despite taking too long, I realised I really enjoyed that type of work and eventually I was able to transfer to lead a Data Engineering team. There is so much to be learned and it’s a very new field, so the domain is loosely defined which makes things very interesting.

How does KI labs fit your life and career goals?

The data engineering team here is almost 3 times as big so there are many engineers to learn from. They also have a huge pool of knowledge; as many of them come from very diverse career paths, all coming together at data engineering.

There were three (+1) factors that convinced me to join KI labs. The first was my interview experience. I had great talks with the team. Second, the portfolio of projects the company is getting into and how important data engineering is in winning projects. I want to grow in data engineering, so it aligned well with my own goals.

Also, the office being near the city centre is a huge draw. My commute distance was more than halved which makes a significant difference in the quality of life. I make one tram connection and I’m at the office.

The +1 is because while I was trying to make a decision about joining KI labs or not, I read the Fireside Chat with Shreyas and Alex.

You joined less than two weeks ago. What’s the first impression of working at KI labs?

The onboarding process was very smooth for me. Everything was at my desk and ready for use. The team was welcoming and I’m getting to know them more over lunches. The data team dynamic is somewhat different than a product-company’s data team would be like since some of the engineers are working on projects completely different than other members of the team. Since I am a Lead, this will be an area of focus for me; understanding each team member’s wants and frustrations and trying to improve team cohesion while not restricting the freedom each engineer has. I’m quite excited to see what we’re able to accomplish!