About
About Mohammad Al-Khani
I'm Mohammad Al-Khani, a Staff Software Architect and Backend Engineering Lead at General Motors in Austin, Texas. I design cross-platform architectures, establish paved roads that multiple teams build on, and eliminate the distributed-systems bottlenecks that cap high-throughput production environments.
- Role
- Staff Software Architect & Backend Engineering Lead, General Motors
- Experience
- 14 years: General Motors, Life360, Upstart, CodeObjects, Oracle
- Education
- M.S. Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University (3.99 GPA)
B.S. Computer Science, Prince Sultan University (ranked 1st in class) - Scope
- Multi-team architecture, platform engineering, data architecture, AI governance
- Track record
- $2M+ annual cloud savings · $10M+/yr client licensing eliminated · 99.999% SLOs
- Location
- Austin, Texas · open to hybrid or remote
Scope & influence
Most of my leverage comes from what other engineers adopt. I write the technical design documents and lead the architecture reviews for cross-team initiatives, and I turn the patterns that work into standards: shared client libraries, reusable CI/CD building blocks, design-document templates and an org-wide AI review framework.
I make the case for new structures when the organization needs them. At General Motors I championed and helped establish Platform Engineering and won staff-engineer buy-in for GitOps. I mentor senior and junior engineers across teams and have interviewed 17+ senior and staff candidates to raise the hiring bar.
Career
Oracle (7 years). Built the database performance tooling enterprise DBAs rely on in Oracle Enterprise Manager and Oracle Management Cloud, including metric-threshold synchronization across thousands of monitored databases for Fortune 500 clients.
CodeObjects. Owned architecture for an InsureTech platform's litigation system and its zero-trust authorization layer, and replaced a licensed migration tool with an in-house ingestion engine that eliminated $10M+ a year in client licensing.
Upstart. Founding senior engineer on Loans Pricing: replaced a monolithic pricing flow with a plug-in API gateway and co-founded the engineering-wide SQL Performance Review Committee.
Life360. Staff-scope on the Optimization Team: platform re-architecture across 30+ microservices under 99.999% SLOs and more than $2M in annual cloud savings.
General Motors. Lead architecture across distributed systems, platform engineering, data architecture and AI governance.
How I think
Measure first
A system is only as good as its observability and maintainability. I profile before I change anything.
Cost is an engineering metric
Savings come from changing architecture, not from cutting reliability.
Make the right way the easy way
Paved paths, reusable workflows and clear guardrails beat documentation nobody reads.
Raise the people around you
Mentoring, reviews and hiring are part of every senior engineer's job.