Istanbul, Türkiye
✓ 18+ years of working experience at both large enterprise and start-up/scale-up organizations. 12+ years of leadership experience in managing large teams and other managers, 50+ employees. ✓ Experienced in building, scaling, and leading high-performing technology organizations. Skills in IT strategy, digital transformation, leading start-up/scale-up organizations, SaaS product development, enterprise architecture, software modernization, budget management, stakeholder management, project and product management, and organizational leadership. ✓ Leadership experience in fast-growing organizations, from a team of ~10 people to ~350 people, from a start-up to an enterprise organization transformation journey. ✓ Hands-on experience in digital, SaaS, agile, organizational, and cultural transformations. ✓ Worked on different kinds of projects: start-up product development, legacy to SaaS migration, generative AI, in-house ERP development, software architecture, infrastructure modernization, e-commerce, omnichannel, retail, logistics, finance, HR, product lifecycle management, SAP, Jira, RPA, and ITIL. ✓ Certified Agile Coach, Professional Scrum Master (PSM I Certified), Internal Trainer for topics: agility, scrum, cultural transformation. Experienced in leading agile transformation journeys for end-to-end IT organizations, totaling 45 agile squads. ✓ Experienced in leading distributed, remotely working teams efficiently.
• Invent operates as a SaaS software product company that offers AI tools for demand forecasting, inventory planning, pricing, and merchandising. • Managing a multi-disciplinary organization of 30+ employees across Backend, Frontend, QA, and Support backgrounds, distributed into 8 agile squads. Working closely with Product Management and Delivery Teams to launch the new products. Developing E2E UI applications for Invent products. • Encouraged the team to utilize AI more in SDLC to accelerate product delivery. Restructured QA processes to enable more automation and AI utilization instead of traditional manual testing approach. • Helped the team for providing new architectural solutions, component based UI modernization, migration to DuckDB for Parquet support to optimize high-load data layer performance, initiated AWS Fargate POCs for infrastructure modernization. • Achieved an 89% positive manager survey result and maintained a 93.3% talent retention rate by implementing structured 1-1 cycles, personalized career planning, promoting a transparent communication culture and strategic internal rotations to align talent with highimpact projects. • Restructured global support processes by launching night-shift operations, transitioning to PagerDuty for incident management and defining necessary escalation policies for better customer support, bringing necessary key metrics to measure the quality of the services. Closed the gaps effectively eliminating 15% of manual support requests and improved service quality and response times. • Developed post-mortem and pre-mortem meeting culture to proactively address system risks and drive root-cause analysis for critical incidents.
• Evam is a software product start-up/scale-up providing SaaS martech solutions for real-time customer journeys. • Managing 5 squads, 40+ employees (backend, frontend, mobile, architects, QA, DevOps, engineering managers). • Decision maker for the technology vision of the company. Leading and participating in architectural design discussions, infrastructure improvements, legacy to SaaS product migration, and assessing trade-offs and risks. Regularly informing the C-suite and board. • Launched the brand-new SaaS product “EvamX”. EvamX is a cloud-agnostic product that helps Evam's customers achieve real-time marketing and digital engagement processes. It is a dockerized product capable of fast and high-load event processing that has a single code base, which makes it easy to deploy on any public cloud provider or to customers’ own data centers. It is a multi-tenant, GDPR-compliant milestone product contributing ARR generation of Evam. • AI Vision: Added Gen AI features to SaaS product. Launched an LLM-backed AI project for customer support processes. • Organizational Transformation: 29 direct reports to VP decreased to 6 by organizing under 5 managers. • Cultural Transformation: Started Regular 1-1 meetings, regular performance feedback culture. Guided and coached the team to improve their agile way of working by refining scrum rituals and defining metrics. As a result, team productivity and utilization increased by nearly 25%. • Restructured customer support processes to better meet SLAs and increase customer satisfaction. • Worked on cost optimization. 30% AWS cost optimization achieved. • QA Improvements: Defined OKRs and necessary KPIs. Worked on bringing software quality standards to SDLC (SonarQube, Fortify, test automation, unit test coverage, etc.). Started regular pentest executions. • Tech Stack: AWS, Java, Spring, React Flow, Angular, React Native, Flutter, Mobile SDK, Redis, Kafka, MongoDB, PostgreSQL, Oracle, Kubernetes, Python, Apache Superset, Airflow.
• DeFacto is an international retail enterprise company with 500+ stores in 30+ countries with 20.000+ employees. • Managing 8 software development teams, 50+ employees (developers, analysts, testers, engineering managers). • Leading the brand new ERP application development and software infrastructure modernization project, DFAPI. Modern DevOps practices, open source tools, container architecture, microservices, message brokers, cloud-compatible technologies, no-sql, etc. This project is published as a case study at CNCF (Cloud Native Computing Foundation), link: https://www.cncf.io/case-studies/defacto/ • By investing in culture and tech stack, retained an annual talent turnover rate below 10% during the talent competition in the market after the pandemic. • By defining effective software quality metrics, investing in test automation, and improving the CI/CD pipeline; successful deployment frequencies increased from a couple per week to at least 1 daily. Example metrics: Sonarqube code quality score, test automation coverage, code review count, WCF/API response times, system uptime, incident resolution time, release cycle time, etc. • Leading the RPA initiatives. 20+ processes have been automated. As an outcome, between ~15% and ~40% improvement in effiency/error rate/time-spent obtained, depending on the process. • "ITIL Problem Management Process Owner" of the company responsible for establishing a culture of transparency and ownership for effective problem solving. In 3 years ~300 total problems that cause efficiency and quality issues in the product and services were addressed and solved permanently. • Managing ~6 million TL in IT budget. • Technologies and tools: C#, .NET Core, ASP.NET MVC, WPF, WCF, EF, MSSQL, NoSql, Couchbase, Hangfire, Redis, Elastic, TFS, JIRA, Telerik, Azure AppInsight, SonarQube, Docker, Openshift, Microservices, NATS, Zipkin, Grafana, UIPath, Silk Test, etc.
• Managing 6 software development teams (30+ employees). • Developing software solutions and products for various business domains. • In 2019, Successfully launched an in-house developed advanced HR platform replacing the SAP SF application, saving 300K € annually. • Project leader of the "Agile Transformation Project" for the whole IT division since 2017, founded Agile Office. Led the transformation journey from a silo-based organization into 45 cross-functional agile teams(Scrum and Kanban). • Responsible for the JIRA ecosystem and products being used at DeFacto. JIRA Software, Service Desk, and Confluence for 1600+ users. • Attended many interviews and have recruited 50+ employees so far. Organized new graduate and MT hiring events.
• Managing 3 software development teams (15+ employees). • Successfully launched an in-house-developed modular SOA-based ERP application. Successfully led data migration from a Windows Forms-based old software to this new system. ~2 million lines of code and 60+ modules, serving desktop, web and mobile clients. It has been live since 2016, and it is still the core product of DeFacto for its operations as of 2023.
• Using a GIS based BI tool (Visual Fusion) as a base platform developing solutions for different business areas like logistics, retail, security, health etc.
• Part of the development team that launched the first e-commerce platform of Arçelik, www.arcelik.com.tr