Hello, I'm Burak.
Engineering Leader · Principal Engineer · Former CTO / Head of Engineering
I’m an engineering leader and software engineer based in Berlin, with 15+ years of experience building distributed systems, platform infrastructure, and data-intensive software across fintech, payments, e-commerce, logistics, and supply chain. Over the years, I’ve worked across both hands-on and leadership roles, including Principal Engineer, CTO, and Head of Engineering. I’m currently at Wayfair, where I work on large-scale platform and data systems.
My work sits at the intersection of software architecture, technical strategy, engineering leadership, and business execution — from modernizing complex platforms and scaling teams to improving reliability, cost efficiency, and delivery speed.
Outside of work, I enjoy traveling with my family, exploring different cultures and cuisines, following basketball, and occasionally writing about technology, leadership, and the evolving craft of software engineering.
- Distributed systems
- Platform engineering
- Data platforms
- Engineering leadership
- Technical strategy
- Reliability
- Fintech & payments
- E-commerce & logistics
- Supply chain
- AI-assisted engineering
- The Pull Request is Dead: Surviving the AI Code Avalanche
Code production is no longer our bottleneck. The newfound velocity of AI coding agents hasn't solved our problems; it has simply moved the bottleneck further down the pipeline, creating massive SDLC backpressure. The human "Looks Good To Me" on a PR is now the single biggest liability in deployment. It’s time to stop acting like typists and start acting like architects.
- AI Made Coding Cheap. Coordination Is Still Expensive
AI dramatically accelerated individual coding and local execution. End-to-end delivery barely moved. We optimized leaf-node execution but left the tree structure completely manual. Business intent (“add fraud detection”) decomposes into tasks across teams, each carrying implicit assumptions that only conflict during integration. Performance budgets, data freshness requirements, and retry semantics remain undiscovered until week 8 of 10. AI can breeze through well-defined tasks with deterministic verification. But getting from business requirement to that well-defined task? That’s where projects die.
- The Terraform Bootstrap Problem: How to Create Your State Backend Without Going Insane
The first real test of your infrastructure-as-code understanding: creating the Terraform state backend when it doesn't exist yet. My personal reference for handling the bootstrap problem across different scenarios. Covers production failure patterns, the bootstrap module approach that survives audits, migrating existing infrastructure, S3-compatible backend quirks, and a complete checklist. ~15 minutes read that might save you days of recovery work.