Mourad ElSheraey

Stay curious, explore deeply, have fun 🏴‍☠️🕹️⚙️

2023 - Present

I am the Director of Engineering at Syntheia (Sydney and New York), which puts legal AI in front of live M&A and fund formation work at AmLaw 100 and Magic Circle firms. I built and lead the cross-functional team of 16 (13 engineers, 3 product designers), migrated the platform off a legacy architecture while retiring 53 repositories, and own security and compliance: SOC 2 and ISO 27001, penetration testing, and recovery drills across single-tenant environments on three clouds.

I stay in the code: 596 pull requests merged and 625 reviewed across 24 services in the last three years. I gave the team an agent toolkit that closed 977 vulnerability alerts this year against 179 in the three years before, and introduced AI coding agents under guidelines I authored; merged-PR throughput rose 66%.

2024 - 2025

I co-founded 0Brokers as CTO: commission-free real estate for Egypt. Listings and search across nine of the country's largest property developers, a market-intelligence layer over the major portals, and one React codebase shipped to both Google Play and the App Store with Capacitor.

2021 - 2024

I co-founded Dytomic, a Montreal game studio building Pirate Raids Online, an MMORPG, where I was the lead software engineer and later a board member. Funded in part by Telefilm Canada's conceptualization and prototyping programs; our internship program graduated 16 students across programming, design, and art.

2021 - 2023

I was a senior software engineer at Optomatica, building for its clients: a loan management and general ledger platform for Flend, myFawry's NFC electricity-card recharge module to ISO/IEC 7816, OrganAI's calendar module on the iCalendar spec, an identity document verification pipeline serving several accounts, and the algorithm and geocoding integrations behind the race companion Racemate. I also contributed design, development, and testing across fintech, proptech, and consumer products for Racefox, Optobot, Elves, NudgeLabs, Kaching, ValU, Azimut, Jilatee, AlMohaseb ERP, and Nawy. I represented the company at a CIT conference convened to discuss NTRA's IoT framework.

2021 - 2022

I was the lead software engineer on Optofolio, building a robo-advisor end to end for a wealth management platform later listed in Egypt's FinTech Landscape Report, leading a cross-functional team of five.

2020 - 2021

I was the technical lead of Quality Control & Assurance at the Egyptian Military Academy. We co-built the department, secured ISO 9001 and ISO 22000 certification, and automated survey evaluation with computer vision.

2019 - 2021

I was a data scientist at Optomatica: transformer models (BERT) for Kaggle's TensorFlow 2.0 Question Answering, research on face recognition and its ethical questions, and IoT and computer vision prototypes on Raspberry Pi and Jetson Nano.

2019

I volunteered as a software tester for IBM's Digital Nation Africa platform: I reviewed all of its courses, earned every certificate available at the time (verifiable on Credly), and reported a bypassable quiz-attempt limit and credentials exposed in production.

2019

I trained in embedded software testing at Valeo, a Tier-1 ADAS supplier: embedded C, AUTOSAR, CANoe, and CAPL. My exercises and solutions from the academy are preserved in vsea-testing-academy.

2015 - 2019

B.S. in Computer Science at Cairo University. High Distinction, first in class, GPA 3.81/4.0 (95.25%). Along the way I co-founded the Think and Code problem-solving camp.

2012 - 2019

Seven years inside a proprietary MMORPG engine as a game developer at MXPGAMING (Alessandria, Italy; remote): game systems, map and equipment tooling, and security patches for everything from item duplication and buffer overflows to backdoors planted by other developers. This is where I learned to program, and why.

bio

Mourad ElSheraey is a software engineer at heart who grew into engineering leadership, and he is happiest in roles that keep him building, whether that means leading a team, contributing directly, or both. He is the Director of Engineering at Syntheia, where he built and leads the 16-person engineering and design team behind a legal AI platform used on live M&A and fund formation work at AmLaw 100 and Magic Circle firms. He previously co-founded 0Brokers (commission-free real estate for Egypt) and Dytomic (a Montreal game studio building an MMORPG), and worked across machine learning and fintech engineering at Optomatica in Cairo. He got here by getting hacked: a phishing page took his Tales of Pirates account when he was in third grade, and he has spent the years since learning how things like that are built, starting with a Pac-Man clone at nine.

mentoring

2023 - Present At Syntheia I run an internship program built around structured mentorship, established the team's evaluation and career-development framework with the leads, and host an internal engineering-talks series; some sessions make it to the public playlist.
2021 - 2024 At Dytomic our internship program graduated 16 students across programming, design, and art.
2017 - 2018 I co-founded Think and Code, a C++ programming camp at Cairo University: ~50 students, fundamentals through competitive programming, over a multi-year curriculum. The curriculum & materials and the camp page are still up.

selected repos

Everything here lives on my GitHub, where the pinned repositories are the freshest.

ocr-or-not runs 20 PDF classifiers into one verdict matrix: should this document go through fast text extraction, or does it need OCR?

hexscout-autopsy is a forensic archive and museum reconstruction of a retired app (2023–2026). It began as groundwork for a rebuild that a few friends in the PulseChain community asked me for; we concluded the exercise when committed hands proved scarce, and, candidly, my confidence in Pulse's economics never quite matched their enthusiasm. Apps die; their engineering lessons don't have to.

poc-marsa-planner is a vibe-coded proof of concept: goal-based Monte Carlo financial planning for Egyptian wealth advisors, with real-terms calibration on EGX30, CBE, and CAPMAS data, attainability verdicts, and scenario comparison. FastAPI + React + Tailwind.

coding-challenges preserves interview take-homes, live coding, and pre-screening exercises with original problem statements, approach notes, and honest outcomes, including the ones that didn't land.

featured writing

Apr 2026 AI Didn't Break Your Code. Your Process Did
Jan 2022 [Summary] Fundamentals of Software Architecture: An Engineering Approach, Chapter 1 (also in Arabic)

publications

Inject or Navigate? Token-Efficient Retrieval for LLM Analysis of Transactional Legal Documents

arXiv 2026

Mahmoud Hany, Mourad ElSheraey, Mahmoud Said, Peter Naoum

misc unsorted

Computer gaming: I played Tales of Pirates, Robots, Yu-Gi-Oh!, FFXIV, Guild Wars 2, League of Legends, Minecraft, DOOM, and GTA; modded the game files of Age of Empires; and built trainers, tools that change values in memory, for Hitman, Club Penguin, and others. MMORPGs and their complex worlds are what pulled me into development.
I speak Arabic, English, and French, in roughly that order of confidence.

sharing the name

ElSheraey is not a common name, in any of the ways it gets spelled. If you carry it, you are welcome to a page of your own here, at yourname.elsheraey.com, hosted next to this one and free. If you need an address at this domain as well, ask me and we will work it out. Use the envelope at the top of this page.

thanks

To the mentors who shaped how I work:

My father, the first and best of my mentors, who taught me to always offer a hand and never wait for anything in return, and whose library at home made learning a habit, not an effort.
My preparatory and secondary school teachers, who used every school activity to shape us into people who never fear to speak up or venture into a new idea.
Prof. Samhaa R. El-Beltagy, now Chief AI Officer at Nawy and one of MIT Technology Review Arabia's 30 leading Arab experts in AI, who mentored me in NLP through Kaggle's TensorFlow 2.0 Question Answering.
Lt. Gen. Ashraf Salem Zaher, now Egypt's Minister of Defence and Military Production, under whom we co-built the Quality Control and Assurance department at the Egyptian Military Academy.
Mohamed Rafea, co-founder of Bey2ollak, who mentored me in financial modeling through the Optofolio robo-advisor.
Dr. Mohammed El-Beltagy, founder and CEO of Optomatica, who mentored me in simulation and modeling, entertained my curiosity in business, and let me roam across the company's products.
Saif Khair, co-founder and CEO of 0Brokers, formerly of STC's technology and operations leadership, who mentored me into the CTO role and showed me how communication, discipline, quality, and integrity come together to make a great team.

And for the page itself: format borrowed with admiration from Andrej Karpathy, ethos from motherfuckingwebsite.com and thelastmotherfuckingwebsite.com.