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 work where backend architecture, platform engineering and data performance meet: the systems that have to stay correct at peak traffic and the platforms other engineers build on.
How I got here
I started at Oracle, spending seven years on the tools DBAs use to monitor and tune databases. That's where I learned performance engineering from the inside: metric collection at scale, workload simulation, and alert quality.
At CodeObjects I led architecture for an enterprise SaaS platform and its authorization layer. At Upstart I was a founding senior engineer on a new team, where I also co-founded an engineering-wide SQL performance review committee.
At Life360 I worked staff-scope on an optimization team responsible for performance, reliability and cloud cost under 99.999% availability SLOs.
Today at General Motors I lead architecture across distributed systems, platform engineering, data architecture and AI governance. The case studies describe the work itself, without tying it to any employer.
How I ship
Agile, two-week sprints with planning and design up front.
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.