I graduated from the Institute of Banking and Financial Sciences at Aleppo University in 2009 and expected a career in finance. The events of 2011 redirected that. I moved to Istanbul and began working in journalism, first as a news monitor and press review editor for the Syrian National Coalition, then as co-founder of Turkpress, an Arabic-language news platform covering Turkey for the wider Arab world. The market reasoning was simple: Turkey was central to Arab readers in those years, politically, economically, culturally, and there was no serious Arabic-language source covering it. We ran the company for three years.
I relocated to Germany in 2018. The first years went to language and integration. I began professional work in 2021 with Soziale Arbeit Mittelmark e.V. in Brandenburg, working in migration support, and took over leadership of the Mobile Migration Support department in January 2024, two parallel projects, a team of social workers, families to house, authorities to navigate.
In September 2025, a friend from the Turkpress years contacted me. Al Jazeera Media Network needed someone to build and run a new creative-engineering unit inside their Arabic Digital News division. I founded Digital Solutions & AI that month. The unit currently has five internal tools in development. I run it remotely from Brandenburg, in parallel with the social work, two team-lead roles, two countries, one calendar.
Founded the unit inside the Arabic Digital News division and lead it remotely from Brandenburg. The unit's mandate is broadcast-grade AI tooling for editorial production, building internal software that newsroom teams use directly.
Lead the Mobile Migration Support department in Brandenburg, a department covering two parallel projects, both built on outreach social work and decentralised housing for refugee families.
Appointed member of the municipal advisory board for migration and integration. Contributes to policy recommendations and represents the interests of migrant communities to the city administration.
Founded and lead the Digital Solutions & AI unit at Al Jazeera in September 2025. The unit's work is broadcast-grade AI tooling for editorial production, internal software the newsroom uses directly. Practical scope covers AI pipelines, infrastructure across cloud and on-premise GPU, motion and creative-coding output, and the cross-functional alignment that turns experimental work into shipped tools.
Leading creative-engineering work is its own discipline. The team has to ship reliably enough for a newsroom to depend on it, and explore openly enough that next year's tools can exist. Holding both at once is the actual job.
Where I worked in this domain — Al Jazeera Media Network
Lead a department at Soziale Arbeit Mittelmark e.V. covering two parallel projects in migration support and decentralised housing. The work is operational and human at the same time: team leadership, financial oversight, complex casework, and the daily mediation between clients, landlords, authorities, and the wider community.
This domain teaches what no engineering job can: that a process which works on paper can fail in a kitchen, and that the difference between "the system says" and "the family needs" is where good operators earn their keep.
Where I worked in this domain — Soziale Arbeit Mittelmark e.V.
Two roles, both signals of trust granted by the local community rather than positions sought. Appointed member of the City of Brandenburg's Migration Advisory Council since January 2025, contributing to policy recommendations on migration and integration. Elected Deputy Works Council Representative at Soziale Arbeit Mittelmark e.V., supporting colleagues in workplace matters and labour-rights questions.
Civic roles teach a different muscle from professional ones, the work is slower, the consensus is harder, and the audience is broader. Useful counterweight to private-sector reflexes.
Where I worked in this domain — City of Brandenburg an der Havel · Soziale Arbeit Mittelmark e.V.
Co-founded and ran Turkpress from 2014 to 2017, three years of operating a small media company end to end: business operations, staff supervision, reporting, presentations, and the documentation discipline that keeps a small organisation legible to itself. The market thesis was correct; the execution was the harder part.
The instinct that survived from those years is the one that asks, before any new initiative, who actually needs this and why. It's the question most institutional projects skip and most founder-led projects don't.
Where I worked in this domain — Turkpress (Co-founder & Administrative Manager, 2014–2017)
Worked in Arabic-language news from 2012 onwards. Started as a news monitor and press review editor for the Syrian National Coalition in Istanbul, covering English and Arabic sources daily and producing the daily review. Co-founded Turkpress in 2014, a news platform created to fill a real gap, Arab readers had strong economic and political reasons to follow Turkey, but no serious Arabic-language source covered it. Ran the company for three years.
The discipline media leaves in you is hard to fake: working under deadline, judging signal from noise, writing for an audience that won't forgive imprecision. That instinct still shapes how I lead technical work today.
Where I worked in this domain — Syrian National Coalition, Turkpress, Al Jazeera Media Network
I treat team-building as the first product. Before any tool ships, the team that ships it has to be the right shape, the right people, the right division of labour, the right rhythm. Most projects that fail in newsrooms or social-sector programmes fail at this layer, not at the execution layer. Getting the team right is slow work and looks unproductive from the outside; I prefer to be slow at it on purpose.
Multilingual operation is not a nice-to-have for me, it's the medium I work in. I run technical conversations in English, social-sector conversations in German, editorial conversations in Arabic, and stakeholder management in whichever combination the room needs. The interesting part isn't the languages themselves; it's noticing, in real time, which register a conversation is actually being held in, and adjusting before the misunderstanding compounds. Most cross-cultural project failures are register failures, not language failures.
I prefer decisions documented in plain prose to decisions captured in tickets. Tickets describe tasks; prose captures why. A team that knows why a decision was made can adapt it when conditions change; a team that only has the task can only execute or escalate. I write a lot, internal briefs, executive summaries, decision memos, because writing is how I find out what I actually think.
The journalism years left a habit I haven't lost: the assumption that an audience will not forgive imprecision. That carries into engineering work as a low tolerance for hand-waving, into social work as a low tolerance for paperwork that doesn't survive contact with reality, and into management as a low tolerance for plans that no-one on the team can repeat back accurately. Specificity is the cheapest form of respect.
Comfortable assembling and troubleshooting hardware, working knowledge of networking, virtualisation, and server administration. Hands-on with Linux, Docker, and automation. Practical experience with AI deployment, including LoRA fine-tuning and inference orchestration on GPU infrastructure. The technical work is in service of the team, not the other way around.
Last updated · May 2026