Professional
Background
The through-line across 18+ years—from consumer streaming to aviation optimization to NFT launches—is the same: take messy, high-stakes scale problems and ship systems teams trust in production. Lately that means AI agent governance, visibility, and operational control (ACTower), backed by deep full-stack, data, and distributed-systems experience.
Summary
I build and lead full-stack, data, and distributed systems spanning backend services, frontend applications, ETL and data pipelines, cloud infrastructure (AWS, Azure, Kubernetes), CI/CD, and observability.
I have a strong record shaping technical direction, driving architecture decisions, and operating high-availability systems that support critical business workflows and large-scale customer experiences—including hiring, mentoring, and high-ownership cultures in close partnership with product and business stakeholders.
Core skills
How I lead
- Set technical direction with explicit tradeoffs; keep execution aligned with product and business risk—not slide-deck architecture.
AI agents in production
- Design for visibility, human approvals, audit trails, and safe rollout—not only model quality—so agent workflows survive real operators and incidents.
Platforms & reliability
- Own services end-to-end: distributed and event-driven backends, APIs, observability, and incident culture (SLOs, dashboards, postmortems that change behavior).
Data, stack, and domains
- Data pipelines, warehouses, and operational stores; AWS, Azure, Kubernetes, CI/CD. Languages in anger: Java, Python, JavaScript/TypeScript, React, Node, SQL, plus Solidity/Rust where web3 work required it.
Experience
Scope and outcomes across each role.
Independent Principal Engineer · ACTower
- Co-building ACTower, a platform for monitoring, governing, and managing AI agent workflows.
- Designing systems for agent visibility, human approvals, and operational control for production use.
- Prototyping multi-agent workflow patterns for reliability, auditability, and observability across terminal and web-based environments.
- Authored “Your AI Agents Are Running Wild, Here's How to Take Back Control” — a practical framework for putting guardrails around autonomous coding agents without sacrificing productivity.
- Published “Visibility, Approvals, and Auditability for Multi-Agent Coding Workflows” — a follow-up examining the observability, approval, and audit primitives required to ship multi-agent systems safely.
Principal Software Engineer · Wheels Up
- Built and scaled the Data Science Engineering team from 1 to 5 engineers by defining the hiring bar, interviewing, onboarding, and mentoring.
- Led production optimization platforms, growing owned applications from 3 to 22 in under three years with data science, product, and operations.
- Re-architected fragmented optimization services into four cohesive, team-owned products—reducing complexity, accelerating deployments, improving onboarding, and cutting production incidents.
- Introduced containerization and CI/CD from the ground up, reducing operational overhead and improving deployment reliability.
- Established Datadog-based observability across logs, metrics, dashboards, and alerts; improved incident response and increased service reliability to over 99.8% availability with fewer than one reported bug per week.
Software Engineer · Magic Eden
- Joined during rapid scaling of launch operations and marketplace traffic, taking on multi-chain tooling and release workflows for high-volume NFT launches.
- Built full-stack tooling across Ethereum, Polygon, and Solana—frontend, backend, CLI, and smart contract integrations for NFT protocols and launch operations.
- Automated NFT collection releases across several chains, replacing manual processes and reducing operational risk and time-to-launch.
- Strengthened release security by integrating AWS KMS into collection workflows to protect private keys and harden production safeguards.
Senior Software Engineer · Netflix
- Owned a backend service that generated profile-level match scores for unwatched titles, supporting personalization at scale for 200M+ customers globally.
- Owned the high-throughput notification system that prioritized and delivered real-time notifications to subscribers' devices (internal codename RENO).
- Owned an internal EVCache orchestration platform that created new cache clusters and seeded them by copying data from source clusters, helping enable Chaos Kong’s production AWS region evacuation drills and multi-region failover resilience.
- Shipped personalization and delivery improvements through controlled experiments—balancing fresh ranked experiences against proven winners to protect engagement and stability.
- Led full-stack internal tools used by hundreds of daily users for ML performance analysis, personalized asset selection monitoring, and title health workflows.
Senior Software Engineer in Test · Big Fish Games
- Contributed to Game Manager, a customer-facing desktop client used by millions for discovery, purchasing, downloads, and DRM.
- Drove evolution of Game Manager into an advertising platform, generating millions of dollars in incremental revenue.
- Built a reusable in-app purchase framework across multiple games for additional virtual goods revenue.
- Owned internal tooling and release workflows for DRM and game asset delivery, supporting 20+ employees and reliable delivery to millions of customers.
Software Engineer in Test · Microsoft
- Contributed to end-to-end development and testing for UML Designers in Visual Studio 2008 and 2010 within an agile product unit of 50+ engineers.
- Owned memory testing across the product unit, helping resolve memory leaks and 15 memory-related product crashes.
- Built a memory monitoring tool for virtual/private/committed memory and GDI counts; used Visual Studio, WinDbg, .NET Profiler, and PerfMon for debugging.
Education
- M.S. in Computer Science, University of Houston — Aug 2005 – Oct 2007 (Graduated with honors)
- Graduate Studies in Informatics, Technical University of Munich — Oct 2003 – Aug 2005 (Selected for graduate exchange program; continued MS studies at the University of Houston)
- B.S. in Computer Engineering, Istanbul Technical University — Oct 2000 – Jan 2005 (Graduated with high honors; ranked 2nd in graduating class)