Kerem Turhan

Chief Technology Officer at Moodivation

Istanbul, Türkiye

About

With over 20+ years of experience, I bring a duty-obsessed mindset and a commitment to putting both people and missions first. I'm a product engineer. My approach reflects military and elite forces, coupled with a self-made journey as a software engineer. I specialize in distributed systems and excel in fostering trust within teams and organizations. Employing the element of surprise against rivals has proven to be one of my most effective tactics in competitive scenarios. As the motto goes, "The only easy day was yesterday," underscoring my dedication to continuous improvement and facing challenges head-on. Also, I have expertise in cloud technology, databases, and versioning systems. I have extensive full-stack web development knowledge and expertise in programming languages such as C#, Golang, PHP, and JavaScript and frameworks such as Angular and React. Additionally, I am skilled in database programming, scaling, and optimization techniques for both relational and NoSQL databases. Scaling hundreds of thousands, millions of users of SaaS products and multi-tenancy solutions, projects, and products. My experience includes working with various web service programming approaches such as SOAP, REST, WCF, and GRPC. I am well-versed in software engineering principles including SOA, SOLID, OOP, containerization, CQRS, service bus, event-sourcing, and DDD. I have experience implementing distributed queue systems such as RabbitMQ, Amazon SNS-SQS, and Kafka. I have worked with cloud systems such as CloudFlare, DigitalOcean, and Azure, and I also possess skills in network design and development. My proficiency in versioning systems includes GIT, TFS, and others. Tech Summary: Proficient in C#, PHP, JavaScript, Angular, TypeScript, and Golang. Expertise in databases, including SQL Server, PostgreSQL MySQL, Vitess, Elasticsearch, Redis, MongoDB and ClickHouse. Skilled in implementing web services programming approaches such as SOAP, REST, WCF, Graphql, and GRPC. Experienced in software engineering principles such as SOA, SOLID, OOP, containerization, CQRS, service bus, event sourcing, and DDD. Proficient in implementing distributed queue systems such as Azure Storage Tables/Queue, Azure Service Bus, RabbitMQ, Amazon SNS-SQS, and Kafka. Manuel or MassTransit auto management. Knowledgeable in cloud systems such as Cloudflare, DigitalOcean, and Azure. Highly skilled in systems design and development. Azure DevOps (Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery), Jenkins Proficient in versioning systems, including GIT, TFS, and others.

Experience

  • Chief Technology Officer at Moodivation
    Mar 2026 - Present · 5 mos

    Moodivation is an AI assisted platform for analysis, survey, feedback and development for people-oriented organizations.

  • Principal Architect at SmartMessage
    Jul 2025 - Mar 2026 · 9 mos

    Led a team through a challenging sprints and helped bring it back on track, providing hands-on support with mobile SDKs, debugging, and delivery. Led the Customer Data Platform (CDP) from proof of concept through to production readiness using AWS, NiFi, EMR (AWS Elastic Map Reduce), Lambda, ClickHouse, and S3. Redesigned key bottlenecks and documented the process thoroughly. Delivered Best Time, Best Channel, and RFM capabilities ready to scale. Transitioned the AI content provider from a major third-party vendor to an in-house AI solution, reducing costs and increasing control. Implemented 80% unit, integration, and end-to-end test coverage. Significantly improved bulk import performance by redesigning critical pipelines, reducing processing times from hours to minutes and, in some cases, seconds. Also identified and resolved a number of important security issues, including data isolation concerns. Delivered fixes for long-standing critical bugs that had remained unresolved for years, significantly improving overall system stability. Identified and resolved PostgreSQL bottlenecks and production incidents. Introduced and standardised the framework for distributed tracing, telemetry, and monitoring using tools such as Seq, Jaeger, OpenTelemetry, and Grafana, enabling end-to-end service visibility. Completed a full proof of concept for migration from NGINX to APISIX. Delivered a production-ready proof of concept for an Elasticsearch-based segmentation architecture. Provided extensive support for the migration from bare-metal infrastructure to Kubernetes. Reported to C-level stakeholders and worked closely with team leads, infrastructure and DevOps teams, and data engineers. Established a standardised interview process and question set, and planned and conducted technical interviews with candidates. Participated in government incentive programme audits and supporting documentation.

  • PEAKUP ()
    • Technical Lead
      Jul 2023 - Jul 2025 · 2 yrs 1 mo

      During my duty, I try to keep the bar high as always. Rebuilding the Velocity Micro Applications and shipping new features of Velocity with a team of great people, day to day in and out... Providing well-tested, simply designed, but solid and sensitive calculation algorithms. Gathering, coordinating, and conducting day-to-day multiple operations with several teams (more than 30+) simultaneously to maintain sales, marketing, and engineering. Lead and decide with senior and principal-level engineers for a better codebase, highly scalable, highly resilient, and very low-cost Azure and also Azure DevOps operations. Help front-end teams with ongoing UI/UX transition. Automate and make stronger company-wide projects with Azure DevOps. Participate in code reviews, performance reviews, and career programs. Coordinate cross-functional collaboration between departments. Provide technical guidance and support to junior team members. Implement continuous improvement initiatives for process optimisation. Analyse and interpret data to drive informed decision-making. Collaborate with stakeholders to define project objectives and deliverables. Stay updated on industry trends and best practices to enhance team productivity. Facilitate training sessions and workshops for skill development. Ensure adherence to quality standards and best practices in all operations. Conducting technical knowledge and experiences to other units such as FrontEnd Developers, Talent and Culture, and Recruitment services, like a capital investment approach.

    • Principal Software Developer
      Jul 2022 - Jul 2023 · 1 yr 1 mo

      Kept top performer awards. Developed, maintained, and deployed Velocity on a daily basis. Negotiated for the roadmap and trade-offs. with stakeholders including C-level management. Plan, execute, and adapt the same doctrine and principles for Data and Analytics products and also for other teams including product, business, sales, and support. Help for deep-dive technical support cases. Eliminate repeating and manual every single transaction. Organise, motivate, participate, analyze, and review the codebase refactoring sessions with staff and senior engineers. Conducting, discussing, and operating on design reviews with the other principal engineers, product owners, sales, and senior full-stack software developers.

    • Senior Software Developer
      Jul 2020 - Jul 2022 · 2 yrs 1 mo

      Back-to-back two-year excellence awards for highest performance not only in the unit but in the entire company! Built a hyper and instant scale infrastructure from six figures to seven-figure user traffic via a micro-service and monolith-oriented approach with distributed services for more than 100+ domestic and multinational customers. Introduce the most spoken 10+ multi-language support for the full product. Provide Microsoft Graph API benefits for further widget features and user benefits. Develop, extend, and scale the back/front end for Microsoft Teams integrations. Using the Microsoft Azure platform and hybrid SQL databases for GDPR, but also security cases. Build, design, and document better, stable, easy-going, budget-friendly engineering environments and tools for development, beta, or next-level production stages-branches. Follow the Azure DevOps platform's best practice capabilities and keep releasing the most recent engineering craftsmanship with zero downtime interruption, day or night! Encourage and get hands dirty with juniors, cross departments, interns, or middle-level developers and provide mentorship to achieve the company's goals. Share the experience of Microsoft Exams and certification programs level of the associate or expert level.

  • Guest Lecturer at Istanbul Arel University
    Feb 2024 - Jul 2024 · 6 mos

    In cooperation with PEAKUP and Arel University Branded Curriculum, we trained 3rd and 4th-year computer engineering students with two other team members for four hours every week throughout the entire season, spring 2024. Some of the topics we cover; OnPremise Operations and Working Data Centers High Scale Requirements and Cloud Principles Microsoft Azure (Pricing, VMs, SQL Databases, Web Applications, Containers, Queue Solutions, Networking, Security etc.) Azure DevOps (Git, CI, CD, Jenkins) Machine Learning (Models and Azure Studio) Information Security and Information Warfare Code Improvements (Advanced Microsoft Visual Studio) Cyber Security Hands-on coding experiences.

  • Founder at indirimKodu.Gen.TR at İndirim Kodu
    Apr 2015 - Dec 2021 · 6 yrs 9 mos

    [sold, exit] The business model of the site increases the conversion rate of online shops by providing coupon codes and recent campaigns. The main purpose of the site is to provide related visitors to e-commerce businesses. Awards and Achievement # Top 3 publishers of 2016 Black Friday Campaign in ReklamAction Inc. advertisement network. # More than 300K visitors in the first year with only 60 stores. # Top 4.5th position on the leading search keywords.