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Hani Al-Shater

Head of Search
Zalando
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I lead Search at Zalando in Berlin: an organization of engineers and applied scientists working on retrieval, ranking, and LLM-based personalization. Before that, I led applied science for ranking, recommendations, and generative AI at Zalando.

Most of my career has been spent turning messy questions into systems that ship. At Amazon, I led applied-science teams behind customer reviews, star ratings, questions and answers, community moderation, and gift recommendations. Earlier, at souq.com, I worked on search, recommendations, and the data infrastructure underneath them.

What this blog is for

Somewhere along the way I noticed that the hardest problems in production were rarely about the model. They were about definitions: what counts as a gift, a relevant result, an improvement, an understanding. That is where philosophy turns out to be useful. Not as decoration, but as a debugging tool for the assumptions we ship along with the code.

So this blog sits where those things meet:

  • Philosophy for builders. Saussure, Wittgenstein, Hume, and Baudrillard as lenses on machine learning and the tech industry.
  • Decision-making under uncertainty. Bandits, ranking, experiments, and how teams choose what to work on.
  • Leadership. Short essays on running teams of scientists and engineers.
  • Interactive demos. Models that actually train in your browser, so you can poke the idea instead of trusting my description of it.
  • The occasional story, when an argument works better as fiction.

I write in English and in Levantine Arabic, and most posts exist in both. I am also writing a book, The Dream That Gave Us Computers, which follows the old dream of writing down reason itself, from Leibniz to today's language models. Some of its chapters appear here first.

Things I've built along the way

  • Launched Amazon search in the UAE and Saudi Arabia.
  • Owned the algorithms behind Amazon's star ratings, reviews, Q&A, and community moderation.
  • Co-built Amazon's first proactive image moderation system.
  • Built search science, recommendations, and big-data infrastructure at souq.com.
  • Hired and grown teams of scientists and engineers across Europe, the US, the Middle East, and India.

Get in touch

The best place is LinkedIn, where I also publish Coffee & Commute. Or email me at hani.alshater@gmail.com. Disagreement is welcome; it is usually more useful than agreement.