Belal Haikal

Belal is an Engineering Manager with 14+ years leading software teams across e-commerce, media, retail, and security, currently leading engineering at bol.com, Benelux's largest e-commerce platform. He combines hands-on technical depth with people leadership, having led distributed teams of up to 20 engineers across multiple continents.

Beyond his day job, Belal runs Fikra Ventures and personally built and operates echo3s.io, a production AI audiobook platform, giving him direct, practical experience with LLM integration, agentic orchestration, and production AI infrastructure rather than theoretical knowledge alone. He has also run structured AI best-practices training for engineering teams, focused on measurable adoption and efficient, safe use of AI tools in real workflows.

Fluent across multiple languages and cultures, Belal has done AI-augmented translation and localization work professionally, giving him a practical eye for where AI tools genuinely help versus where they quietly introduce errors.

When he's not training AI models or engineers, he's somewhere between a barbell and a spreadsheet, currently mid-way through a body recomposition program, tracking progressive overload with the same rigor he applies to sprint capacity planning. Turns out the principles transfer: show up consistently, measure the right things, and don't skip leg day (or the retro).