About

I’m Imrul Sheikh – an Engineering Manager at MediaMarktSaturn Technology in Germany and previously Director of Software Engineering at Adidas.

Over 16+ years I’ve gone from writing PHP in Dhaka to leading 60 engineers across Europe and India, building e-commerce platforms that serve millions of users across 37 markets. Two threads run through all of it: making complex systems work reliably at scale, and growing the people who build them.

What I write about

This blog covers the topics I think about daily:

AI agents and platforms – I’m currently building an enterprise AI platform on GCP at MMS. That means agent orchestration, guardrails, evals, cost control, and the hard parts of shipping AI to real consumers responsibly. Most of what I write here comes from building, not theorizing.

AI platform operations – Gateway architecture, cost controls, drift detection, and building reliable infrastructure for agent-based systems in production. The operational patterns you learn when scaling LLMs across an enterprise.

Distributed systems and software architecture – consensus protocols, data structures, messaging systems, reliability patterns. The fundamentals that make large-scale systems work. I spent 5 years at Adidas architecting checkout and commerce platforms where a bad deploy during a Hype drop meant millions in lost revenue.

Engineering leadership – hiring, one-on-ones, performance management, giving feedback, building trust, crucial conversations, decision-making. I lead 16 engineers across frontend, backend, QA, and data – and I’ve written about each of these topics because managing engineers is a craft that deserves the same rigor as system design. Whether it’s coaching someone through a growth plateau or navigating a difficult conversation, the patterns matter as much as the people.

Career highlights

MediaMarktSaturn Technology (2025–present) – Engineering Manager leading 16 engineers on GCP-based platforms. Building an enterprise AI platform with a Principal Engineer – deep on agent architectures, governance, and safe rollout patterns for consumer-facing AI.

Adidas AG (2018–2025) – Grew from Senior Engineer to Director of Engineering, ultimately leading up to 60 engineers across Europe and India. Led the global e-commerce re-platforming from Salesforce Commerce Cloud, saving over 20M EUR annually. Architected the checkout orchestration layer connecting 20+ systems at 99.95% availability. Built and scaled 3 engineering teams across India, the Netherlands, and Spain, interviewing 100+ engineers in 6 months. Rolled out a unified observability platform across 40+ microservices, cutting MTTD by 30% and MTTR by 50%. Beyond the technical work, this is where I developed my approach to people leadership – running structured coaching cycles, building hiring pipelines from scratch, and learning that the most impactful engineering decisions are often about people, not technology.

Seek Asia (2017–2018) – Technical Lead building event-driven platforms for SEEK’s blue-collar job marketplace in Malaysia.

IQVIA (2010–2016) – Progressed to Team Lead delivering BI and SaaS platforms for global pharma clients. Drove the evolution from on-premise BI tools to cloud-native solutions on AWS.

Technical background

Languages: TypeScript/Node.js, Java/Kotlin, Python, React/Next.js

Infrastructure: AWS, GCP, Kubernetes, Kafka, Terraform

Data: PostgreSQL, MongoDB, DynamoDB, Redis, Cassandra, Elasticsearch

AI/ML: Vertex AI, Bedrock, SageMaker, Databricks

Certifications: AWS Solutions Architect – Associate, AWS AI Practitioner – Associate, GCP Cloud Architect (in progress)

Beyond work

Father of three daughters. Based in Franconia, Germany. Originally from Bangladesh. I speak English, German (B2), and Bangla.