Product & Engineering Program Manager
Arif Khan
Engineering-fluent PM and Leader who gets things shipped at global scale — from building quality culture at Toptal's elite core team to owning product & engineering squads at Al Jazeera, one of the world's most-watched media organisations.
11 years of building at scale
From QA engineer to leading cross-functional squads at one of the world's most-watched media organisations. Every step intentional.
Career Timeline
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Before software, there was teaching. These years gave me the human skills that still define how I lead: empathy, patience, simplifying complexity, and a deep belief that growing people is the most meaningful work you can do.
Entered software through quality engineering at Pakistan's top tech companies. Built my engineering foundation — manual testing, test strategy, exploratory testing — and learned that quality is not a department, it's a culture.
Joined Al Jazeera's Product & Digital Innovation team. Designed and scaled test automation frameworks across squads, embedded quality culture, and collaborated with senior engineers across Europe and the Middle East. Simultaneously earned MS in Project Management from FAST-NUCES (2021).
Joined Toptal's Core engineering team — fully async, globally distributed across dozens of countries. Contributed to platform quality strategy, E2E testing, contract testing (Pact), and API testing at scale across microservices.
Returned to Al Jazeera in a senior leadership role overseeing two squads. Responsible for product roadmap, vendor governance, editorial tooling, and stakeholder alignment across engineering, editorial, and executive leadership. Also active as a Toptal expert freelancer.
Core Expertise
Key Initiatives
AkRetro — Live Sprint Retrospective Platform
A real-time, collaborative retrospective tool I designed, built, and launched end-to-end from scratch. One shared link lets a distributed team drop feedback cards, dot-vote what matters most, and walk away with tracked action items — instead of insights that get forgotten by the next sprint.
Anonymous mode for honest feedback, hide-until-reveal voting to kill anchoring bias, action items with owners, due dates & reminders, five retro templates, a built-in timer, and CSV export — with no account needed to join a board.
Visit akretro.com ↗AI-Powered Technology Collaboration
Led a major strategic technology partnership driving AI capabilities across Al Jazeera's digital infrastructure — coordinating engineering, editorial, legal, and executive stakeholders across multiple geographies.
Managed end-to-end program ownership: stakeholder alignment, legal coordination, technical discovery, and cross-team integration. Navigated complex organisational dynamics across editorial independence and engineering pragmatism.
Large-Scale Media Platform Migration
Led a multi-milestone media platform migration with zero-downtime delivery at a 24/7 global news organisation reaching over 100 million viewers.
Navigated complex vendor relationships, technical constraints, and the operational reality of a newsroom that cannot afford downtime. Delivered all milestones on schedule with zero disruption to live broadcasts.
PakhtoEd — Pashto-Language EdTech Platform
A free Pashto-language EdTech platform delivering technology education to Pashtun communities worldwide — 100K+ views, 5K+ followers, 100+ lessons, 500+ students across 10+ countries.
Content spans YouTube, Facebook, TikTok, and Instagram — all bilingual Pashto/English. A personal mission proving world-class tech education is achievable regardless of language or geography.
Visit pakhtoed.com ↗Teaching & Mentorship
University Lecturer — Software Quality Engineering
Designed and delivered a full-semester course on Software Quality Engineering to 5th-semester CS students at FAST-NUCES — Pakistan's most competitive CS university. Covered real-world test strategy, automation, quality culture, and the engineering mindset behind shipping reliable software at scale.
Volunteer Mentor — Teenagers & College Students
Volunteered across multiple mentorship programmes helping teenagers and college students break into tech — entirely free. Covers career roadmaps, entering software from non-traditional backgrounds, interview prep, and building the long-game mindset for a career in engineering.
Webinars on Remote Work & Software Quality
Host and speak at webinars and talks on breaking into remote work, thriving on globally distributed async teams, and building a lasting career in software quality engineering — sharing the hard-won playbook from years working across time zones with Toptal and beyond. Recorded and shared freely for anyone starting out.
Watch on YouTube ↗Trusted by teams
at global scale
Core Team
members
tenure
Toptal community — Pakistan chapter
What Colleagues Say
Education & Credentials
How I Think
"Anyone can do mediocre work. Take ownership, exceed expectations, and leave a legacy — that's what sets truly great professionals apart."
"AI is not replacing human curiosity. The creative human always finds what pattern-based systems miss."
"The more you teach, share, and mentor — the more compounds back. Knowledge given freely is the highest-return investment."
Ideas & reflections
On product leadership, engineering culture, AI, and the career path less taken.