$ cat about.md
Aziz M. Bookwala
I build engineering orgs that ship fast, scale cleanly, and cost less.
Across 12+ years at Talabat, dubizzle (OLX), Tenderd (YC S18), and early-stage startups, I've consistently taken on engineering orgs facing real challenges - scaling bottlenecks, legacy systems, misaligned teams - and shaped them into high-performing units that deliver.
I'm deep in TypeScript, Python, AWS, GCP, Kubernetes, and event-driven architecture. More recently I've become genuinely excited about AI-driven development - particularly Claude Code - and how it fundamentally changes the way engineering teams build and ship software.
Experience
Head of Engineering
Tenderd (YC S18) Aug 2025 - Jan 2026
- · Transformed a demotivated engineering org lacking direction into a high-performing unit in 6 months.
- · Led migration from a legacy GCP stack to a modern Kubernetes platform, targeting 50% infrastructure cost reduction.
- · Architected an enterprise data platform enabling data-driven and AI-powered product features.
- · Drove developer productivity gains through AI coding tools (Cursor, Claude Code) and CI/CD modernisation.
Sr. Engineering Manager - Core Services Domain Lead
Talabat Aug 2023 - Aug 2025
- · Led mission-critical systems: order management, logistics, catalog, vendor onboarding, and POS.
- · Orchestrated extraction of the Order Processing subsystem from a monolith, cutting incidents by 70% and improving scalability.
- · Led the most critical data migration in Talabat's history: int32 to int64 for the orders table.
- · Delivered zero incidents and zero order loss through Ramadan and Eid - historically the highest-risk periods.
- · Early adopter of agentic coding tools, accelerating time-critical platform upgrades across the team.
Chief Technology Officer
houza Aug 2020 - May 2023
- · First engineering hire; built the team and shaped company and product strategy from the ground up.
- · Scaled the platform to 150K+ live property listings, 100K daily user interaction events, 2K+ daily leads.
- · Designed AWS serverless architecture using Lambda, ECS Fargate, and Glue; established sub-1-hour deployment cycles.
- · Co-led product strategy, driving 40% reduction in wasted effort through rapid validation.
Chief Architect & Head of Infrastructure / DevOps
dubizzle (OLX) Oct 2017 - Jul 2020
- · Led the decomposition of a legacy monolith that took 3 days to release into a microservices architecture shipping in under 1 hour.
- · Reduced AWS costs by 30%, saving $500K+ annually through right-sizing and serverless adoption.
- · Championed Kubernetes migration and Domain-Driven Design across the engineering organisation.
Senior Team Lead
dubizzle (OLX) Jul 2014 - Oct 2017
- · Scaled the Jobs vertical team from 6 to 20 engineers.
- · Monetised the Jobs vertical, generating AED 3M in revenue over two years.
- · Led dubizzle's first mobile team in 2015.
Software Engineer
dubizzle (OLX) Oct 2012 - Jul 2014
- · Member of the Emerging Markets team, building and maintaining platforms across the MENA region.
- · Implemented service-oriented architecture and initial REST APIs.
Skills
Languages & Frameworks
TypeScript JavaScript Python Node.js NestJS Next.js React Django
Cloud & Infrastructure
AWS (Lambda, ECS, Fargate, S3, RDS, SQS, SNS, Kinesis) GCP Kubernetes Docker Cloudflare Workers Serverless
Architecture
Microservices Event-Driven Architecture Domain-Driven Design Monolith Decomposition API Design
AI & Tooling
Claude Code LangChain MCP RAG AI Agents Prompt Engineering N8N
Data & Messaging
PostgreSQL MongoDB Redis Kafka AWS Glue Data Pipelines
DevOps & Observability
GitHub Actions Jenkins Grafana PagerDuty Infrastructure as Code
Education
Bachelor of Engineering, Information Technology
Vishwakarma Institute of Technology
2006 - 2011