Sameh Aboelnil

About Sameh

I'm an engineering leader with 20+ years in the industry, currently a Software Development Manager at AWS in Melbourne. Before Amazon I was a Senior Engineering Manager at Atlassian, where I led Jira and developer productivity teams and built an organisation of up to 90 engineers. Earlier in my career I worked at Xero, SEEK, and NAB — where I led the delivery of the bank's first Open Banking service under Australia's Consumer Data Right, on a regulatory deadline that didn't move. I've run more than 80 hiring interviews as a hiring manager, and I've been on the candidate side of loops at Amazon, Google, Canva, and Atlassian recently enough to remember exactly how it feels. I know what a bar-raiser is listening for, why strong engineers get downlevelled, and how a good answer falls apart in the last five minutes. I coach engineers and engineering managers on EM and senior IC loops: system design, people management and behavioural rounds, levelling strategy, and the harder question of whether you're interviewing for the right role in the first place.