--- title: "Work Experience" description: "Every role so far: what I was hired to do, what I actually did, and the numbers where I have them." author: "Mohammad Abu Mattar" canonical: https://mkabumattar.com/experience --- # Work Experience ### Cloud & DevOps Manager, Motory · Full-time, Mar 2026 - Present, Al Hamra, Jeddah · Amman, Jordan I run the cloud strategy and platform engineering for Motory, a large automotive marketplace. I manage a multi-cloud environment across AWS, Huawei Cloud, and Hetzner, staying about 70% hands-on with the architecture and code. I lead a DevOps team responsible for the reliability, scalability, and security of our production microservices serving 1M+ active users. I also own our CI/CD practices, cost optimization, and compliance work in a high-availability, multi-region setup. - **Infrastructure as Code:** Moved everything from manual console clicks to 100% Terraform. I set up GitOps using ArgoCD and Helm to keep our deployments consistent and auditable. - **Modernization:** Led the shift from a monolith to microservices for 1M+ users. I wrote a multi-runtime Helm chart that standardized how we handle scaling, probes, and networking across all services. - **Custom Tooling:** Built a custom Kubernetes operator in Go to solve a specific provisioning problem that standard controllers couldn't handle. It plugs into the existing Helm and ArgoCD delivery flow, so the resources it manages deploy the same way everything else does. - **CI/CD & Delivery:** Built pipelines using Jenkins and ArgoCD that improved deployment speed by 60%. This includes a private OCI registry and a Kong API gateway. I also added multi-arch builds and automated chart publishing, so releases stopped needing a person to babysit them. - **Reliability & SRE:** We hit 99.999% uptime. I automated cross-region disaster recovery between the Middle East and China using Ansible and the Huawei SDK, and I run our observability stack (Prometheus/Grafana/Loki). On-call runbooks and regular DR drills are part of our routine. - **Cost & Security:** Cut infra costs by 20% while tightening security to meet PCI-DSS and SOC2 standards. This involved identity-as-code via Keycloak, hardening our WAF and VPN, and moving secrets onto KMS/CSMS. - **Team Leadership:** I lead the DevOps team and own the platform roadmap. I also run internal K8s and Docker training for our developers and handle the vendor relationships. ### Assistant Manager DevOps Engineer, Jordan Ahli Bank · Full-time, Oct 2024 - Feb 2026, Amman, Jordan I was platform owner for the bank's AWS estate. Regulated banking means every change needs an audit trail and a rollback that works, so most of the job was making the correct path the easy one and then proving it to auditors. - **Platform ownership:** Ran 15+ AWS accounts and 20+ production microservices, against the availability and disaster-recovery targets a bank actually gets held to. - **Terraform & GitOps:** Standardized deployments on Terraform, with ArgoCD and Atlantis so changes landed through review instead of the console. Handled autoscaling and right-sizing for production workloads. - **Security posture:** Got to 96% across every account using IAM Identity Center, AWS Organizations, and PCI-DSS controls backed by CloudTrail, AWS Config, and Security Hub. - **Delivery pipelines:** Built the delivery path on AWS CodePipeline and GitHub Actions, with automated testing and security scanning before anything reached production. - **Release engineering:** Ran weekly releases and hotfixes across dev, QA, and prod. Zero-downtime deploys, a rollback anyone on-call could run, and a real go/no-go call before shipping. - **Production support:** Centralized monitoring on Prometheus, Grafana, and CloudWatch, plus the incident response workflow and the longer-term platform roadmap. ### DevOps Engineer, cirrusgo (AWS Partner) · Full-time, Mar 2023 - Sep 2024, Amman, Jordan cirrusgo is an AWS partner working with businesses across the MENA region.

I was the engineer on hybrid AWS builds for 8+ enterprise clients, several of them fintech. Most of them arrived with an on-premises estate they were not going to abandon, so the work was making AWS and their existing racks behave like one platform without upsetting whichever regulator they answered to. - **Solution architecture:** Designed the end-to-end builds (microservices, event-driven, serverless) and brought cloud costs down 25-40% through right-sizing, reserved instances, and switching off what nobody was using. - **IaC foundations:** Set up the Terraform and Terragrunt layer and the multi-account, multi-environment structure on AWS Organizations, then wrote the documentation that went with it. - **Container platforms:** Ran containerized workloads on ECS, Fargate, and EKS across dev, UAT, and prod, deployed through GitOps with hardened images. - **CI/CD:** Built pipelines on GitHub Actions and AWS CodePipeline/CodeBuild with canary deploys, automated tests, manual approvals, and promotion from dev to UAT to prod. - **Security & compliance:** Handled access control and compliance across three regions (Middle East, US East, Europe) and the on-premises side, with security scanning and monitoring running unattended. ### Software Engineer - Microservices, Nagarro · Contract, Feb 2022 - May 2022, Remote Nagarro is a German software services company doing consulting and outsourcing work.

A short contract on the fintech side, working on Spring Boot services that moved money and the PostgreSQL layer underneath them. - **Fintech services:** Built Spring Boot microservices for transaction processing, and stayed with them through the full SDLC rather than handing them off at merge. - **PostgreSQL:** Owned persistence, including schema migrations and connection pooling. - **Front end:** Built components in Angular, HTML, and CSS, and cleared production bugs and performance problems as they surfaced. - **Documentation:** Wrote the technical docs so the next person did not have to reverse-engineer any of it. ### Full Stack Developer, Freelance · Full-time, Jan 2020 - Feb 2023, Amman, Jordan · Remote Client work I ran end to end, alongside a full-time job for most of it. Fintech backends in Spring Boot, React front ends, and everything around the code: scoping, timelines, and the awkward conversations about what would actually ship. - **Scoping:** Ran the conversations that turned a vague ask into something buildable, and kept clients honest with me about what they actually needed first. - **Backend:** Designed Spring Boot microservices for fintech clients, with PostgreSQL and other databases behind them. - **Front end:** Built responsive interfaces in React, HTML, and CSS, tested on the devices the clients' customers were really using. - **Delivery:** Managed timelines and deliverables, and owned the client relationship directly with nobody in between. ### Teacher Assistant/Lab Supervisor, Isra University · Full-time, Dec 2018 - Dec 2019, Amman, Jordan Isra University is a private institution in Amman offering undergraduate and postgraduate programs.

I taught C++ fundamentals and ran the lab sessions. In practice I was the person students came to when the compiler said something they could not decode. - **Lab sessions:** Built and ran the C++ labs, and sat with students while they worked through the exercises rather than just handing them out. - **Curriculum:** Worked with faculty to design and update the lab material. - **Support:** Helped students and faculty with whatever programming problem was blocking them. - **Feedback:** Tracked how students were progressing and told them plainly where they stood. ### Web Developer, Greater Amman Municipality · Apprenticeship, Dec 2017 - Feb 2018, Amman, Jordan The Greater Amman Municipality runs the city's administration and planning.

My first job in the field: a short apprenticeship building internal web tools, mostly front-end work in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. - **Internal tools:** Built and maintained web applications for the administrative teams. - **Requirements:** Sat with the team to work out what they needed before writing any of it. - **Testing:** Tested and debugged what I shipped instead of waiting for someone to report it. - **Training:** Supported and trained the people who had to use the tools every day.