Core memeber @ iPIP

Hello, I’m Ahmad Abdul Wakeel

 I am a transformational engineering leader with 21+ years of experience building modern data platforms, intelligent systems, and AI-ready architectures across Groupon, Amazon, IBM, and Avaya. I specialize in leading global teams, modernizing legacy ecosystems, and delivering large-scale cloud, data, and AI transformations that unlock measurable business outcomes in e-commerce, communications, and industrial domains.

Experience

Director of Software Engineering – Global Data Platform & Engineering @ Groupon (US)

2019 – Present(Director / Senior Manager / Manager roles)

  • Lead Groupon’s global data platform and engineering organization, processing billions of events and 5PB+ of data with 99.9%+ availability while serving data needs across all business verticals.
  • Own platform strategy, roadmap, and P&L budget, aligning data and analytics capabilities with C-suite priorities and company OKRs.
  • Directed end-to-end migration from on-prem Teradata, Hadoop/Hive, and legacy ETL to Google Cloud (BigQuery, Dataproc, Composer, GCS), consolidating 800+ legacy pipelines into 400 optimized, cloud-native workflows.
  • Delivered multi-year modernization and cost-optimization programs, achieving multi-million-dollar OpEx savings through infrastructure simplification, vendor rationalization, and automation-driven efficiencies.
  • Built and restructured a global engineering organization across North America, EMEA, and APAC, fostering an AI-assisted engineering culture using Gemini, Vertex AI, RAG, and agent-based development practices.

Software Development Manager (SDM III) @ Amazon

2018 – 2019 – Ireland

  • Led engineering for Amazon’s Intelligent Cloud Control Platform, focusing on reliability, observability, and security at scale.

Software Development Lead & Architect @ IBM

2012 – 2018 – Ireland (Delivery Manager / Lead / Architect)

  • Led the design and delivery of Industrial IoT and operational intelligence data platforms for energy, utilities, and manufacturing clients.
  • Built a multi-tenant IoT platform managing 100K+ endpoints for predictive maintenance and intelligent asset management.
  • Delivered end-to-end solutions for Veolia, Scottish Power, Miami-Dade County, and SSE as part of a multi-million-dollar partnership portfolio.

Team Lead & Architect @ Avaya

2008 – 2012 – Ireland (Team Lead / Architect / Senior Software Engineer)

  • Led development of Aura Presence Services, a real-time unified communications platform used by 50+ Fortune 500 customers with 99.99% uptime.
  • Architected high-availability presence aggregation and federation services with integrations to Microsoft OCS/Lync, IBM Sametime, and XMPP platforms, expanding market reach.

Verint (Graham Technology) – Software Engineer

  • Delivered enterprise CRM integration and deployment projects.

Ericsson – R&D Engineer

  • Built distributed O&M components for LTE network management within Ericsson OSS.

INRIA – R&D Engineer

  • Developed middleware for dynamic service discovery of edge devices.

Quartics (Communication Enabling Technologies) – Software Developer

  • Implemented application-layer software for remote server management (iKVM) with Linux kernel-level integrations.

Education

  • M.Sc., Software Engineering of Distributed Systems – KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden
  • B.S., Computer Science – National University of Computer and Emerging Sciences (FAST), Pakistan

Certifications & Achievements

  • IEEE publication and 9 U.S. published patents in large-scale distributed data platforms and intelligent systems.