Dubai, United Arab Emirates
Two decades of hands-on engineering. Eight years running my own consulting practice. Underneath both, one constant: I'm drawn to problems nobody else wants to touch — the legacy system everyone's afraid to change, the bottleneck nobody can explain, the architecture decision with no obvious right answer. My background is Engineering Physics, and it shows in how I work: strip a problem down to its real structure, then build the simplest path through it. Code is my primary tool, not my identity. That discipline has carried across very different terrain — a marketplace serving 25M+ customers, CDN infrastructure processing 1TB of logs daily, a payments platform scaled from 300 to 5,000+ taxis. Sometimes the answer was microservices. Sometimes it was deliberately keeping a well-structured monolith, because the trend wasn't right for that business. As a Principal Architect, I stay hands-on while making the calls that matter early — the ones that save teams months of pain later. Strangler Pattern migrations, distributed systems redesigned under production pressure, engineering teams mentored through architectural transitions. My measure of success: decisions that still hold up when the CFO asks why. I'm now building Think & Solve Different Solutions, my Dubai-based consultancy - architectural assessments, modernization roadmaps, and engineering-team upskilling, often in fractional or advisory capacity. Alongside it, I'm formalizing twenty years of practice into credentials: AWS Solutions Architect and iSAQB CPSA-F, currently in progress. If you're facing a modernization challenge, a scaling problem, or want a second pair of experienced eyes on your architecture: my inbox is open.
Independent practice launched Jan 2025; formally incorporated as FZE, Jan 2026. ● Founded a UAE-based technology consultancy offering architectural oversight, system-integration guidance, and cloud-readiness advisory for enterprise clients. ● Actively building a target-client pipeline and go-to-market positioning across the UAE and Turkey markets, supported by a public technical presence (portfolio site, LinkedIn content) to establish credibility with prospective enterprise clients. ● Pursuing AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate and iSAQB CPSA-F certifications, formalizing two decades of hands-on cloud and software-architecture expertise into industry-recognized credentials. Tech Stack: Microservices, AWS, Cloud Integration, Software Architecture
● Domain & System Scope: Owned the Discovery & Delivery domain — spanning cart-to-checkout progression, shipping/delivery method selection and tracking, and promotions/discounts, with some overlap into inventory — roughly one of 8–10 core domains within n11's legacy platform. Collaborating with the SRE, core architecture, and DevOps teams during the microservices transition built a working understanding of the platform's broader service topology, while the shared legacy codebase gave visibility into how adjacent domains were structured. ● Strangler Pattern Migration: In consultation with the core architecture team, decoupled the Discovery & Delivery domain from the core legacy platform onto an independently deployed microservice — moving the team off the shared release train onto a weekly release cadence, and cutting PR validation-and-build cycles from over an hour in the legacy system to about 5 minutes. ● Data Consistency & Safety: Used a Transactional Outbox pattern with Debezium CDC into Kafka to guarantee idempotent, consistent event delivery to the new service, and implemented a legacy-side traffic switch enabling instant rollback during the transition. ● Knowledge Transfer & Enablement: Independently completed all requirements to bring the team's first production microservice to a fully standalone, production-ready state, coordinating with the relevant architecture, security, and platform teams along the way. Authored a reusable playbook covering the architecture rationale, coding standards, and internal approval process, then delivered a 2-hour walkthrough to the ~8-9 person engineering team, followed by hands-on pairing on subsequent microservice tasks to embed the pattern. ● Code Quality: Maintained TDD practices and met the team's CI/CD quality gate — 80%+ test coverage enforced via SonarQube/JaCoCo — across microservice development. Tech Stack: Java, Spring Boot, Spring MVC/Security, JPA/Hibernate, Microservices, GCP, JUnit, Mockito
Ran an independent architecture consulting practice for eight years across fintech, telecom, tourism-tech, and performance engineering — including co-founding Yupeka as Managing Partner. ● Fintech: Rebuilt a failing in-taxi payment platform breaking down at 300 taxis — redesigned it as a modular, multi-instance-capable monolith (deliberately avoiding premature microservices), integrating POS terminals and partner banks' APIs to automate payouts, cutting driver payment time to 2 hours. Scaled to 5,000+ taxis. ● Vodafone Turkey: Sole architect of 'Tıkla Kapına Gelsin', a lead-generation platform simplifying mobile number portability — AngularJS frontend, Spring Boot REST backend, integrated with Vodafone's internal services. ● Telecom Performance: Pinpointed critical instability in a high-throughput Alarm Engine via on-site VisualVM profiling; advised on thread-pool separation. Follow-on POCs: no-code Kafka Connect ingestion; Keycloak-based SSO. ● SoftExpert: Reverse-engineered an undocumented workflow engine via log and database trace analysis; built a REST API layer and a dynamic hybrid mobile app adapting to each workflow's state. ● Database Migration: Moved a live Java/Hibernate legal-compliance platform from Oracle to SQL Server with zero downtime, extending the Hibernate dialect with custom mappings. ● Training: Apache Tomcat deep-dive for Mercedes-Benz Turkey; Spring/Spring Boot/REST program at Multinet. ● Yupeka (2018–2019): Led data/BI — Python/Django/Pandas reporting POCs, data-warehouse modeling, Pentaho ETL; built a multi-tenant SaaS MVP assessing Industry 4.0 readiness. ● TDMS: Architected a mediation layer unifying disparate tourism inventory data behind a single API — role-based access, asynchronous rule engine, rule-driven caching. Tech Stack: Java, Spring (Boot/Security/AOP/Data), Hibernate, Python (Django, Pandas), Kafka, Keycloak, Docker, Kubernetes, PostgreSQL, Oracle, SQL Server, Redis, RabbitMQ, VisualVM
Two distinct engagements: a permanent engineering role (2011–2013), followed by a return as a contractor (2014) focused specifically on analytics. ● Streaming Media Systems (Engineer, 2011–2013): Worked across the end-to-end video delivery architecture of a high-traffic CDN, spanning both live streaming and video-on-demand. Delivered core components addressing the domain's hardest problems — content protection against unauthorized viewing, adaptive multi-rendition transcoding, and reliable network DVR (record/replay) under load — while developing deep fluency in CDN caching strategy (hit/miss dynamics, pull vs. push models, cache warm-up). ● Log Analytics Pipeline (Consultant, 2014): Engaged on a contract basis to solve the CDN's log-analytics problem. Co-designed the pipeline with a senior systems engineer — evaluated and ruled out a Hadoop-based approach due to infrastructure cost (~4 Gbps network, ~20 machines), instead grouping logs in-memory, buffering through Kafka, and ingesting into Elasticsearch via Logstash. Scaled the cluster from 4 to 8–10 nodes over time while maintaining a 5–10 minute latency window on ~1TB/day of log volume; pushed summaries to MySQL and pruned detailed indices to balance performance against storage cost. The resulting analytics gave the business consistent, reliable consumption data for billing, plus dimensional breakdowns (by country, device, and other attributes) that customers could report on directly. Tech Stack: Java, Java Concurrency, JCE, JCA, Wowza, Kafka, Logstash, Elasticsearch, MySQL, Ruby
● Insurance Application Development: As an outsourced engineer embedded in Anadolu Insurance's fire-insurance module team, developed features on a modular legacy application with a rule-engine-driven UI (JBoss Seam), working within structured SDLC and release-management processes using an IBM enterprise version-control tool. ● Industry-Wide Regulatory Integration (SBM): When Turkey's national Insurance Information and Monitoring Center (SBM) mandated integration across all insurance carriers under a fixed deadline, handled the extraction, validation, and transmission of policy data from the company's AS400 legacy system to the new central regulatory platform. Tech Stack: Java, Hibernate, JBoss Seam, Aurora, Oracle, AS400