About
Strategic Technology Executive with 20+ years of experience building and leading world-class engineering organisations. A practitioner in Platform Engineering and Developer Experience, with a track record of transforming fragmented technical landscapes into high-velocity, centralised ecosystems.
Career
TomTom
2022 – Present · AmsterdamDirector of Engineering — Platform Engineering & Developer Experience
- →Scale: Leading a 120+ person organization across global hubs, serving the full engineering population.
- →Transformation: Consolidated a fragmented legacy toolchain into a unified Internal Developer Platform (BackStage).
- →Fiscal Impact: Managed a multi-million-euro platform budget and delivered substantial annual recurring cost savings.
- →Performance: Modernized API infrastructure to support high-volume daily traffic and improved onboarding from days to hours.
Booking.com
2016 – 2022 · AmsterdamSenior Engineering Manager — Developer Experience & Infrastructure
- →Led 35+ engineers in a multi-year transformation of company-wide build and release systems — a unified deployment standard for one of the world's largest travel platforms.
- →Directed engineering teams within Payments and Infrastructure Security, ensuring 24/7 availability for platforms processing millions of global transactions.
VeriPark
2007 – 2016 · IstanbulSenior Engineering Manager / Software Architect
- →Designed and delivered large-scale digital banking platforms for Tier-1 banks across EMEA, with a focus on scalability, security, and multi-tenant architecture.
- →Progressed from senior developer to architect to team lead — building the instincts for what today's industry calls Platform Engineering and Developer Experience.
Education
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Executive Leadership & Management
Cambridge Judge Business School · 2025
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Master's in Management and Organisation
Marmara University, Istanbul
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BSc Mathematical Engineering
Yildiz Technical University, Istanbul
Speaking
Speaking
All talks →Stop Treating AI Like Magic Infrastructure
Observability & SRE Summit · London
AI is a workload, not magic infrastructure. The observability, FinOps and ownership disciplines we already run for every other service, applied to LLMs and agents in production: see it, cost it, own it.
View talkResilience by Default
RBLN Europe · Amsterdam
The resilience patterns that kept the software lifecycle standing under load, blast-radius containment, golden paths, and idempotent recovery, applied to AI and agentic workloads, and where the failure modes are genuinely new.
View talkUnlocking Your Team's Potential by Creating the Right Environment
Bind2Tech Podcast
How psychological safety, reduced friction, and the right environment are the real levers for unlocking engineering team potential.
ListenOutside Work
I read about 100 books a year — mostly fantasy and science fiction. I track and write about them at hundredbooksayear.com.
I coach at the local football club where my son plays. There's something about building a team from scratch — the communication, the trust, the culture — that maps surprisingly well to engineering leadership.