Ezgi Gurkan

I spearheaded the automation of time utilization tracking for the consultants of a large management consultancy to maximize billing rates, which also provided standardized global reporting across offices worldwide.

This work was initially performed manually by a senior HR employee, taking up almost his entire time and causing numerous data accuracy and consistency issues. I devised a solution to completely automate the process and convinced senior HR, finance, and IT stakeholders, including the CTO, to try the new approach.

The solution involved a data warehouse, ETL processes pulling data from several business applications, and complex reports incorporating all the business logic.

The output of this process was required by the parent company of the consultancy, which owned numerous other consultancies. We were the first to automate this process and were asked to replicate it in other subsidiaries. Unfortunately, I left the company soon after and didn't see how the project would progress.

I redesigned a legacy data application that calculates performance and risk metrics of the company's funds, which had strict regulatory requirements. The new solution saved the responsible team a considerable amount of manual work every month, increased data accuracy, and introduced flexibility to allow end-users to configure different outputs they need.

This was the largest project I had ever done in my career and took more than three years. With intermittent help from various teams, we scoped requirements, built data pipelines, modeled complex data relationships, implemented statistical metrics, developed automated data quality processes, and managed stakeholders in five-six teams, as well as senior management.

The technical solution involved a data warehouse-type solution in Snowflake using dbt, various automated processes in Python, and a custom front-end application. Almost every member of the data engineering team was pulled into this project at various points, with me being responsible for the overall design. It was a great collaborative effort.

As the technical co-founder of a startup, I built a SaaS application that allowed users to optimize their digital marketing budgets across different ad platforms, such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

I developed a profitable high-frequency trading application for cryptocurrencies that executed market-making and arbitrage strategies on large exchanges, such as Coinbase, using price and volume information.

This was a performance-driven, multi-threaded application using the FIX protocol and Level 3 market data.

I used TDD, continuous integration, and automated testing processes during its development and deployment.

As the sole founder of a startup, I developed a SaaS application to provide DevOps and BI capabilities for SharePoint Online and Project Online, saving clients hundreds of hours of consultant time.

My work also included managing a team of freelance web developers to implement the application's front end. In addition, I formed partnerships with two consultancies to better understand client requirements and help with sales.