Yasser Hennawi

Munich, Germany · Head of Product Engineering @ Data Machine Intelligence

I build great products and scale teams into 10X engineers.

Engineering leader with 10+ years across cybersecurity, fintech, and aerospace. I care about pragmatic architecture, strong engineering culture, and using AI to make great teams dramatically more effective.

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about

About

I’m Yasser, Head of Product Engineering at Data Machine Intelligence, where I lead the AI transformation of the aerospace industry on two fronts. First, building AI-powered products that push autonomy and intelligence into mission-critical defence, aerospace, and space applications. Second, embedding AI across our own engineering processes, tooling, and workflows to multiply how much a small team can ship.

Before this I set the technical foundations at DMI as Principal Software Engineer. Earlier, as a Staff Engineer at NordVPN, I drove web reliability, developer productivity, and the company-wide GenAI initiative. I’m a hands-on principal engineer at heart, with a deep full-stack and platform background, happiest turning ambiguous problems into pragmatic, well-run systems.

experience

Experience

  1. Data Machine Intelligence

    Munich, Germany

    AI-driven autonomy products for the aerospace, defence, and space industries.

    • Head of Product Engineering Feb 2026 – Present
      • Lead the company’s AI transformation of the aerospace industry, owning the product engineering vision and strategy across aerospace, defence, and space.
      • Own end-to-end delivery of AI-powered autonomy products for mission-critical applications, from concept to production.
      • Embed AI across the engineering organisation (tooling, processes, and daily workflows) to multiply how much a small team can ship.
      • Build, mentor, and scale the product engineering team; lead hiring and shape a high-performance engineering culture.
      • Establish engineering standards and delivery practices for safety- and security-critical systems.
    • Principal Software Engineer Oct 2025 – Feb 2026
      • Architected and built the core platform powering DMI’s AI and autonomy capabilities.
      • Set technical direction and engineering standards later scaled as Head of Product Engineering.
      • Introduced AI-assisted engineering workflows to accelerate delivery across the team.

  2. NordVPN

    Berlin, Germany

    Global cybersecurity company providing privacy-first VPN services.

    • Staff Engineer, Engineering Productivity & Web Reliability Apr 2023 – Oct 2025
      • Drove the company-wide GenAI initiative to improve developer experience and productivity.
      • Led an internal service catalog on Backstage for discoverability and standardisation of internal services.
      • Owned web reliability OKRs and monitoring for nordvpn.com (Grafana, Prometheus, Fluent Bit).
      • Maintained CI/CD for nordvpn.com using Kubernetes, GitLab pipelines, ArgoCD, and Terraform.
      • Integrated security tooling for vulnerability and risk detection; contributed to hiring across teams.
    • Senior Fullstack Engineer Sep 2022 – Mar 2023
      • Designed architectural solutions via RFCs and helped define internal engineering standards.
      • Built frontend web apps (Turborepo, Astro/SolidJS, React/Next.js) and web backend services (pricing, checkout) in Node.js and Go.
      • Led the monthly Frontend Guild.

  3. Appinio

    Hamburg, Germany

    Market research platform for surveying highly specific target groups in hours.

    • Frontend Teamlead Jan 2022 – Aug 2022
      • Worked directly with the CTO to mentor and support a frontend team of four.
      • Built and debugged analytics and questionnaire components for the B2B dashboard.
      • Owned versioning and deployment for the private npm registry and the admin/business apps (AWS CodePipeline, GitHub Actions).
    • Senior Frontend Engineer Jun 2020 – Dec 2021
      • Developed core B2B product features and wrote documented end-to-end tests with Cypress.

  4. Egyptian Armed Forces (2nd Field Army, IT Branch)

    Egypt

    Compulsory military service. Development & Automation department, IT branch.

    • Head of Development & Automation Jun 2019 – Jun 2020
      • Maintained a secured internal network and supported existing software across army units.
      • Built custom cross-platform applications to facilitate and accelerate work across units and command.

  5. figo GmbH (now finleap connect)

    Hamburg, Germany

    Fintech / open-banking API connecting developers and businesses with banks in Germany.

    • Frontend Developer (Contract) Jun 2018 – May 2019
      • Built a bilingual RegShield application with a React / redux-saga architecture.
      • Wrote unit tests (Jest/Enzyme) and cross-browser scenarios (cucumber.js); integrated analytics for A/B testing.

  6. Goodsense / DayBreakHotels

    Remote

    Distributed product team building and scaling web apps for clients worldwide.

    • Frontend Developer Jan 2016 – May 2018
      • Built the DayBreakHotels responsive web app (React/Redux/redux-saga, styled-components) with Storybook-documented components.
      • Redesigned the Goodsense web app to Material Design; scaffolded the CyTIX web app from scratch.
      • Integrated analytics (GA, GTM) and hand-rolled A/B testing logic.

work

Selected work

A few themes that run through what I build and how I lead.

  • AI autonomy for aerospace & defence

    Leading product engineering for AI-powered autonomy in mission-critical defence, aerospace, and space, from system design through production, with the standards those domains demand.

    • Product strategy
    • AI systems
    • Safety-critical

  • AI-native engineering org

    Embedding AI across tooling, processes, and daily workflows so a small team ships like a much larger one. The practical side of turning engineers into “10X engineers”.

    • Developer productivity
    • GenAI
    • Culture

  • Reliability & platform at scale

    At NordVPN: web reliability OKRs and observability for a top-traffic site, CI/CD on Kubernetes/ArgoCD/Terraform, and an internal service catalog on Backstage.

    • SRE
    • Platform
    • Observability

contact

Get in touch

Best reached by email. Happy to talk engineering leadership, AI in mission-critical systems, or building high-performing teams.

yahennawi@gmail.com