From Junior ML Engineer to Omdena Chapter Lead in Cairo to a Job Offer at a US-Based Startup

Mohamed Amr from Egypt completed several Omdena Challenges, upon which he became an Omdena Top Talent to work on paid gigs with companies. Through Omdena’s experience, he has recently joined the US company DigsFact to work as a Machine Learning Engineer.

What is your background?

I am a machine learning engineer and AI product manager working with tech companies where I can apply my artificial intelligence experience and build machine learning pipelines and system development skills. My AI experience helps me support next-generation project growth and success. My goal is to create a bridge between business and AI technologies. While having strong programming skills, I can accomplish a proof of concept for the project. I take pride in considering business, user experience, privacy, and technological aspects when designing AI features.

When and how did you enter Omdena? What was the reason?

I joined Omdena in January 2020  as a junior machine learning engineer to do AI for good. I contributed to two projects as one of 45 collaborators. The first project aimed to build an ethical credit scoring system for low-income individuals. The second project focused on how COVID-19 pandemic policies affected vulnerable populations.

Since 2021, I have worked as a machine learning engineer during the project, Building an Organizational Gender Equality Assessment Functionality Using Machine Learning. 

Also in 2021 for 7 months, I was Omdena Chapter Lead in Cairo, Egypt. 

The mission of Omdena’s Egypt chapter was to run open-source AI projects to solve challenges faced by the local community.

In addition, as a product owner and during building “Yarub“, a library for Arabic NLP purposes, I guided a team of 90 collaborators through the Arabic NLP project from scratch. Moreover, I proactively bridged the gap between the collaborator team and Omdena. Also, I demonstrated the ability to drive the product and ensure that it meets the project’s final goal.

What technical solution have you recently built in a project?

We build different computer vision models and deploy them on AWS.

Photo: Every Thursday, Mohamed hosts a live stream where he invites a developer guest from Egypt. They deploy together machine learning pipelines on the AWS cloud.

Some of the projects Mohamed took part in:

• Using AI to Understand Policy Effects on the Economically Marginalized during Pandemics

Increased domestic violence, higher mortality rates of non-Covid19 patients, and more negative effects on vulnerable populations hit by pandemic policy.

• Unbanked – Machine Learning for Credit Scoring: Banking the unbanked!

Leveraging the potential of machine learning for credit scoring to provide millions of people with funding opportunities.

How did the Omdena experience help you in your career till now?

I worked with Omdena on a top talent project for 3 months. Later, I got an offer from the client to join DigsFact as a full-time machine learning engineer.