The backbone of Insider: Meet our engineering team
Insider Engineering is home to a diverse and highly skilled technical team who collectively contribute to the company’s success. Our journey is marked by remarkable milestones and an impressive track record which reflects our continued dedication to innovation and excellence.
This is Insider, this is different
What sets Insider’s technical team apart from the competition? We believe it’s a combination of our unique qualities, values, and methodologies that make us stand out in a crowded field.
First and foremost, we embrace inclusive decision-making. Every team member’s voice is heard, and every perspective is valued. This inclusive approach fosters collaboration and leads to more robust and well-rounded solutions.
Secondly, our team is inherently solution-oriented. Rather than dwelling on problems, we focus on finding solutions that not only address the immediate issue but also eliminate the root cause, preventing future recurrences. It’s about anticipating consequences and ensuring that history doesn’t repeat itself.
Thirdly, self-development and team development are at the core of our ethos. We believe in continuously improving our skills and knowledge, which in turn elevates the entire team’s capabilities. This dedication to growth keeps us at the forefront of technological advancements.
Our engineering team handles a staggering 800 million unique users per month, 500 million personalization impressions per month, 15 billion page views per month, and processing a mind-boggling 25 billion data points — which is no small feat! With 1.5 petabytes of user data processed every month, our team operates on an unprecedented scale, showcasing our expertise in managing and using data effectively.
There are plenty of technical teams across the globe, but our commitment to inclusive decision-making, proactive problem-solving, continuous development, and extracting the best insight for our partners from massive data sets makes us an unrivaled force in the industry.
In numbers
The engineering team in numbers:
- 240+ members
- 4+ locations + remote workers
- 20+ scrum teams
The work in numbers:
- 4.2 billion requests per day
- 6 deployments per day
- 3,600 automated functional tests
- 700+ reposts on GitHub
The data in numbers:
- 1.5 TB of data in per day
- 750 GB of data out per day
- 60,000 filter-based segmentations per day
- 1 billion user-based segmentations per day
- 110 billion total data points
Meet the team: Introducing Insider’s engineering powerhouses
Each team member adds a distinct layer of expertise which makes our team a hotbed of top talent and insights. Our collaborative efforts have helped propel Insider to the forefront of technological advancement. Our goal? To continue shaping the future of customer experience.
Say hello to the team…
Tufan Çetiner: Agile Coach
- Location: Antalya, Turkey
- Years at Insider: 3+
With skills in agile, scrum, coaching, facilitating, organizational change, and performance management, he’s not just well-prepared; he’s a change-maker.
He kickstarted an agile office, promoting innovation and teamwork. His leadership in introducing the “Insider V2: Insider Scaled Scrum Model” made projects run smoother and teams collaborate better. Tufan’s attention to detail brought forth performance metrics like shipping accuracy and cycle time, helping drive Insider to even greater success.
Tufan also fine-tuned scrum events like refining, planning, retrospectives, and daily meetings, making them more efficient and transparent. In a world that values adaptability and efficiency, Tufan’s contributions guide Insider toward excellence in engineering and organizational progress.
Outside of work, Tufan is the proud owner of two dogs, lived in a caravan for two years during the pandemic, and has played football for the last eight years.
Evren Baykan: Head of Mobile (Senior Staff Engineer)
- Location: Istanbul, Turkey
- Years at Insider: 9+
Evren’s accomplishments in the engineering team have been impressive. He started the mobile product from scratch and built a super-fast push delivery system to handle millions of push deliveries in seconds. Although it may not be the fastest anymore, it’s a testament to his innovative spirit. Evren is also great at keeping costs low, managing a product with less than a 3% gross margin (focused on mobile costs only).
Outside of work, Evren prefers animals to humans, is big into anime and manga, hates modern art, and loves human psychology. He was also a licensed basketball and American football player with a small fan base when he played 18 hours a day back in 2008–2009.
Ersoy Pembe: Senior Staff Architect
- Location: Istanbul, Turkey
- Years at Insider: 7+
Over the past five years, Ersoy has been designing, managing, and developing scalable enterprise applications and microservices. In the last two years, he’s also taken on the role of managing multiple teams (55 people in total); a testament to his leadership skills.
In the engineering domain, Ersoy’s achievements shine. He’s designed, developed, and scaled two major Insider products (Web Push and Architect) from scratch, showcasing his ingenuity in product development.
Outside of work, Ersoy is a big tennis fan (since the emergence of Rafael Nadal) and Formula 1 (since the emergence of “The Flying Finn”). He won three football tournament championships while at university, and is enthusiastic about art (especially painting, literature, architecture, and film) and history. He loves to travel and reads a lot.
Deniz Parmaksız, Senior Machine Learning Engineer
- Location: Istanbul, Turkey
- Years at Insider: 6+
Deniz brings a wealth of expertise to the table, with a strong focus on Machine Learning and Data Lake Systems Design. His proficiency in MLOps, the seamless fusion of machine learning and operations, underscores his ability to bridge the gap between data science and production, driving innovation and efficiency.
Deniz has an impressive track record in the engineering team, having designed, developed, and significantly contributed to a range of critical components, including data lake architecture, end-to-end machine learning infrastructure, the creation of recommendation systems, and a diverse array of AI products.
Outside of work, Deniz reads a lot about racing and spends much of his free time in racing simulators.
Halil Akgün, Staff Software Engineer
- Location: Dublin, Ireland
- Years at Insider: 9+
Halil’s key skills and expertise are distributed systems and working with big data. With an eye for designing scalable applications, Halil helps Insider drive innovation for big global brands in an ever-evolving digital world.
Halil designed and developed Insider’s cutting-edge Recommendation Engine product. Additionally, his innovation has extended to the Product Catalog System and Big Data pipelines such as Insider’s clickstream data processing system. This system’s ability to handle vast data streams has been instrumental in refining Insider’s insights and decision-making processes. Moreover, Halil’s Executive Summary dashboard serves as a comprehensive hub, processing and presenting key metrics for Insider’s entire suite of products.
Outside of work, Halil loves hitting the beach as an amateur surfer. He’s also a keen piano player and likes to think of himself as the CEO of mixology cocktails.
Cem Sancak, Senior Staff Architect
- Location: Amsterdam, Netherlands
- Years at Insider: 7+
Cem is a tech virtuoso with a strong command of distributed systems, data stores, and system design. His expertise navigates the intricate web of modern technology, ensuring seamless operation, efficient data management, and robust system architectures.
Cem’s contributions to the engineering team have been remarkable. As well as being the UCD lead, he spearheaded the adoption of several cutting-edge technologies like Prometheus, Grafana, Golang, EKS, and ClickHouse. These choices have since become the standard for many teams, underscoring his role as a tech trailblazer.
Outside of work, Cem’s passion for skiing adds an adventurous twist to his profile, highlighting a love for outdoor thrills in addition to his tech expertise.
Salimcan Venedik, Senior Software Engineer
- Location: Ankara, Turkey
- Years at Insider: 5+
Salimcan’s journey at Insider over the past five years has been marked by his dedication and technical acumen. For the first three years, he maintained and improved Insider’s Web Push product, catering to over 1,000 customers while delving into distributed micro-service architecture. For the last 2.5 years, he has become a true technical leader, steering the development of Insider’s industry-leading WhatsApp and SMS products.
His standout achievements include successfully creating two innovative messaging products, each made accessible to over 200 partners. Salimcan’s adeptness in integrating various service providers into the company’s architecture has helped streamline operations at Insider. His commitment to excellence is evident in the implementation of robust unit testing processes, the establishment of efficient software logging and monitoring systems, and the development of a message-sending rate manager, incorporating a dynamic pool mechanism. Salimcan has also been pivotal in nurturing cultural and organizational processes, making him a versatile and invaluable asset to Insider’s engineering team.
Outside of work, Salimcan has stage experience in Turkey, Turkmenistan, Tunisia, Dubai, and Morocco as part of the Ministry of Culture dance community. For more than ten years, he has been playing the oud (a Turkish musical instrument), and one of his biggest passions is cooking — he plans to become a chef when he retires!
Ömer Mevlüt, Staff Software Developer
- Location: Turkey, Istanbul
- Years at Insider: 8+
Ömer’s key skills and expertise are systems design, Golang, and microservices; a powerful trifecta that fuels his ability to architect and develop innovative and efficient systems.
Ömer has played a pivotal role in the development and enhancement of key business projects and components over the years, showcasing his dedication and expertise. He also spearheaded the development of a competitive product in a well-established field, a testament to his innovative thinking. Moreover, his brilliance shone in a hackathon project that not only clinched victory but also evolved into one of the company’s most successful products, cementing his status as a visionary and a driving force within the team.
Outside of work, Ömer prides himself on knowing many useless things.
Reza Farzaneh, Senior Software Engineer
- Location: Ankara, Turkey
- Years at Insider: 5+
Throughout his journey at Insider, Reza has been pivotal in managing one of Insider’s major products, Web Push. His dedication and technological expertise have helped Insider send over 35 billion Web Push notifications monthly for diverse clientele worldwide. Reza’s expertise extends to orchestrating scalable solutions employing various programming languages like PHP, Golang, and Node.js.
His leadership abilities shine as he effectively leads two teams dedicated to the Web Push product. Beyond Insider, Reza is an entrepreneurial force, having successfully built and steered two startups to prosperity. His dynamic range of skills and achievements underscores his pivotal role in the tech and entrepreneurial realms.
Outside of work, Reza is interested in foreign trade between countries, a topic about which he is constantly learning. In 2016, Reza published a book titled A New Approach to Authentication, in which he outlines a new approach to authentication to counter data security attacks against alphanumeric passwords. In his spare time, Reza also loves to read articles about new technologies, focusing on what new learnings he can take to implement into Insider’s projects and product roadmap.
Awards and recognition
Our technical team is not just a force to be reckoned with; we’re also a team that has garnered accolades and recognition on the global stage. Our outstanding contributions have been acknowledged in various prestigious forums, including the Infus 2023 Paper.
Additionally, we’ve been recognized locally through participation in Subsurface 2023 Data Lakehouse, and PHPKonf (Türkiye), showcasing our expertise and commitment to advancing the field. We’re also an AWS Ambassador, which highlights our expertise in cloud computing.
Join the Insider journey
We’re here to drive growth at a scale that no one has done before. Together we’re building a progressive culture that inspires us to have a bigger, bolder impact on the world around us.
Fancy joining our incredible team and growing your career with Insider? Then take a look at our open positions.
Now, over to you!
Leave a comment, ask us a question, or share your own experience with us! And remember, you can follow Insider’s journey on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.
