Professional
Background
Principal Software Engineer with 18+ years across large-scale consumer platforms, gaming, and web3—recently focused on AI agent workflows, governance, and operational control systems.
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
Leadership & delivery
- Technical leadership, engineering management, hiring, mentoring, cross-functional delivery
AI & platforms
- AI agents, agentic workflows, human-in-the-loop controls, governance, auditability
- Distributed systems, microservices, event-driven systems, REST APIs, gRPC
Engineering breadth
- Full-stack: backend services, frontend apps, data pipelines, databases
- Java, Python, JavaScript, React, Node.js, SQL, Solidity, Rust
Data & infrastructure
- PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQL Server, IBM DB2, Cassandra, Redis, Kafka, SQS, Hive, Presto, ETL/ELT
- AWS, Azure, Kubernetes, CI/CD, Jenkins, Datadog, Linux, macOS
- Web3, blockchain, smart contracts
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.
- Driving early product validation through technical writing and community engagement; authored an article on AI agent governance and operational control: “Your AI Agents Are Running Wild, Here's How to Take Back Control.”
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 high growth as the company reached unicorn status in under nine months.
- Built full-stack tooling across Ethereum, Polygon, and Solana—frontend, backend, CLI, and smart contract integrations for NFT protocols and high-volume launch workflows.
- Automated NFT collection releases across several chains, replacing manual processes and reducing operational risk and time-to-launch.
- Improved release security by integrating AWS KMS into NFT collection workflows to protect private keys and strengthen operational 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 RENO, Netflix's rapid event notification system.
- Delivered features through A/B testing and explore-exploit approaches in content asset delivery and related backend services.
- Contributed to the initial setup of Chaos Kong for chaos engineering and resilience across distributed systems.
- 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 Honor)
- 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 Honor; ranked 2nd in graduating class)