AI Lead & LLM Engineer

HESHAM HAROON

I ship LLM systems that work in production. Not prototypes. Not demos.

Building Arabic-first AI solutions at scale. Leading AI teams. Deploying production chatbots that handle real customers. Published researcher. Mentor at lablab.ai.

95-98% Query Automation
200+ Production Chatbots
8+ Years Experience
Book Paid Consultation
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01. About Me

I'm an AI Lead and Senior NLP/LLM Engineer based in Cairo, Egypt. My focus is Arabic-first AI: building retrieval systems, agents, and chatbots that handle MSA and dialects at scale.

I've automated 40-60% of customer queries on WhatsApp, built AI assistants for Saudi ministries, and led on-prem GenAI deployments that reduced manual work by 25-35%.

Currently leading AI at ECC and consulting for i-Legal Technologies (UAE). Published researcher in Arabic NLP. Mentor at lablab.ai.

"If it doesn't work in production, it doesn't work."

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SUBJECT FILE

Location: Cairo, Egypt
Role: AI Team Lead @ ECC
Consulting: i-Legal Technologies
Focus: Arabic-first AI
Status: Available

02. Experience

AI Team Lead

Egyptian Company For Cosmetics - ECC
Sep 2025 - Present · Cairo, Egypt
  • Spearheaded AI transformation across sales, operations, HR, and finance, achieving 25-35% reduction in manual processing
  • Developed on-prem AI tools and chatbots, decreasing internal request turnaround by ~40%
  • Automated 95-98% of recurring employee queries
  • Led on-prem GenAI and LLM assistants using RAG over ERP/CRM data with secure Arabic LLMs

AI Consultant

i-Legal Technologies Limited
Aug 2025 - Present · UAE
  • Advising founders on comprehensive AI strategies, LLM selection and deployment for legal workloads
  • Designed architecture for bilingual legal NLP: contract understanding and clause retrieval
  • Defined experimentation frameworks and QA guidelines for high-stakes legal contexts

Senior NLP Engineer

WideBot
Jul 2024 - Jan 2025 · Cairo, Egypt
  • Developed Arabic-first conversational AI chatbots for WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger
  • Enhanced intent classification and entity extraction for MSA and dialectal Arabic (+8-15% accuracy)
  • Launched 10+ production chatbots across MENA, significantly reducing human support workload

NLP Engineer

OMOTO
May 2023 - Jul 2024 · Cairo, Egypt
  • Designed and deployed LLM-based NLP services, enhancing task accuracy by 10-20%
  • Fine-tuned large language models on domain data, reducing manual review time by 25-35%
  • Built production APIs in Python with low latency for increasing traffic

NLP Researcher

Iwan Research Group
Apr 2023 - Apr 2024 · Riyadh, Saudi Arabia
  • Evaluated Arabic translation models to identify errors in machine translation
  • Contributed to published paper on PLMs in English-to-Arabic Machine Translation
  • Developed expertise in NLP and machine translation methodologies

NLP Engineer

LingoAI
Oct 2021 - Mar 2023 · Remote
  • Designed and trained large cross-language models, enhancing translation quality by 15-20%
  • Built data pipelines for LingoPod/LingoCrowd, increasing multilingual datasets by 65%
  • Developed LLM-based components, reducing hallucination rates by 25%

NLP Engineer

ASAS AI
Oct 2021 - Sep 2022
  • Applied NLP research on Arabic and domain-specific language models
  • Translated research findings into practical features: classification and retrieval
  • Implemented state-of-the-art NLP models using modern deep learning frameworks

Machine Learning Fellow

Fellowship.AI
Sep 2019 - Oct 2020
  • Developed and deployed scalable ML models in production-like environment
  • Applied cutting-edge deep learning techniques including GANs and LLMs
  • Collaborated with international cohort on model design and evaluation

Freelance ML & NLP Engineer

Upwork
Jun 2018 - Aug 2019
  • Delivered NLP solutions: machine translation, text mining, recommendation systems
  • Designed datasets and text representation pipelines with effective tokenization
  • Trained and optimized NLP models across multiple frameworks

03. Publications

Error Analysis of Pretrained Language Models (PLMs) in English-to-Arabic Machine Translation

Research Paper · Arabic NLP

Comprehensive error analysis evaluating pretrained language models for English-to-Arabic translation, identifying systematic issues and proposing improvements for Arabic MT systems.

Leveraging Corpus Metadata to Detect Template-based Translation

Research Paper · Egyptian Arabic Wikipedia

An exploratory case study analyzing the Egyptian Arabic Wikipedia Edition, using corpus metadata to detect and analyze template-based translation patterns.

04. Skills & Expertise

LLM & GenAI

LangChain LlamaIndex vLLM llama.cpp RAG Architectures Multi-Agent Systems Prompt Engineering Fine-tuning

NLP & Arabic AI

Arabic NLP MSA & Dialects Machine Translation Transformers PyTorch Hugging Face Speech Recognition Text-to-Speech

Production & MLOps

MLOps Chatbot Development API Design FastAPI Python On-Prem Deployment

Infrastructure

AWS GCP Azure Docker Kubernetes PostgreSQL

05. Education & Certifications

Bachelor's Degree in Linguistics

Minia University

ACL Mentorship Program

Association for Computational Linguistics

Mar 2021 - Mar 2022

Diploma

Hertie School

May 2021 - May 2022

Certifications

Machine Learning Natural Language Processing Intermediate SQL IBM SmartCloud Control Desk V7.5 Introduction to Python

06. Leave a Comment

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07. Get in Touch

Interested in working together or have questions about AI solutions? Feel free to reach out through any of the channels below.

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