Irfan Durmus
20+ years of experience
Interested in VP of Engineering, Chief Technology Officer, Chief Software Architect, or equivalent roles.
About
I understand the business well enough to set direction, but I'm most effective when I'm close to the work: the architecture, the code, the decisions that shape how a system actually behaves. What I've learned is that the best outcomes happen when the person holding the strategy also holds the technical judgment. Right now, that means turning established SaaS into AI-native products and rethinking workflows that were designed before modern AI existed.
Work
Technical Architect
San Francisco/CA (Remote)
Oct 2021 - Present
Project: DAZN Moments NFT Marketplace (Mar 2022 – Jul 2023, Tokyo/Japan) - Built core marketplace features: primary and secondary lottery systems for NFT purchase allocation - Sole handover point to DAZN Tokyo: architectural decisions, Jira, and direct client communication - Maintained code excellence across a full-scale GoLang and NextJS codebase on GCP - Contract extended post-delivery for on-call consultation across a couple of sprints Tech Stack: GoLang, NextJS, PostgreSQL, BigQuery, GCP, Kubernetes, Docker, Microservices Project: Various (undisclosed) - Contributed to multiple short-term SaaS projects across different domains globally - Final interview stage for Gigster's talent pool, screening candidates after pre-testing and coding assessments (2022–2023)
Co-Founder & CTO
Incline Village/NV (Remote)
Oct 2023 - Aug 2025
Assembled and led a team of 6 contractors, shipping to the first paying customer in 3 months; beta partners committed funding before the product was fully functional. Reached a 7-figure valuation and double-figure early-adopter customers within the first year. - Architected proprietary PE deal origination platform from concept to production - Directed AI agents and deep research pipelines (LangChain, LangGraph) for autonomous deal sourcing, achieving 95%+ accuracy on company identification - Sourced multiple $100M+ TEV proprietary acquisition opportunities for pilot clients managing $200B+ in combined PE assets - Integrated platform with existing CRMs and third-party data providers - Operated across engineering, product, investor relations, and customer development Tech Stack: NextJS, PostgreSQL, LangChain, LangGraph, ExpressJS, GCP, Kubernetes
Chief Software Architect
Austin/TX (Remote)
Oct 2020 - Sep 2021
Portfolio Company: Alpha Schools, an ed-tech platform built in-house by ESW Capital, operating across multiple US states. Maintained weekly deployment cadence as sole technical gatekeeper of the entire backend. - Developed new features in a serverless Lambda environment - Integrated third-party learning platforms and student data pipelines - Maintained high codebase quality through thorough unit and integration tests - Reviewed all engineering output to uphold the team quality bar - Provided coaching to engineers Tech Stack: Serverless, JavaScript, TypeScript, AWS Amplify, RDS, NodeJS, Docker, Git, Gherkin, Cucumber, Jest
Chief Technology Officer
San Francisco/CA (Remote)
Mar 2019 - Sep 2020
Hired and led a distributed remote engineering team of 20 from scratch at a fintech startup. Architected a pub/sub infrastructure handling millions of requests per minute with uninterrupted uptime. - Planned and owned the infrastructure from day one - Authored engineering playbooks: delivery workflows, on-call procedures, and technical standards for a distributed team - Evaluated technical services and drove architectural decisions for growth and reliability - Worked directly with customers to evaluate requirements and shape product direction Tech Stack: React, Material UI, NodeJS, MySQL, MongoDB, AWS, Redis, WebSockets
Product Chief Architect
Austin/TX (Remote)
Feb 2016 - Feb 2019
Embedded into newly acquired companies with a 3-month mandate to modernize engineering operations (GitHub migration, CI/CD, monitoring, AWS, deployments), then took full ownership of codebases and live systems. Documented and communicated software architectures using the C4 model. Operated from structured engineering playbooks with defined inputs and outputs to ensure consistent delivery across each engagement. Portfolio Company: SLI Systems (ML-powered e-commerce search and merchandising platform) - Established CI/CD pipelines across 100+ codebases - Managed infrastructure across multi-location datacenters serving global retail clients Tech Stack: AWS, CentOS, Jenkins, Nexus, Docker, K8s, C, C++, PHP Portfolio Company: BiznessApps - Drove the Lift & Shift end-to-end, coordinating 15-20 people across QA, Software Architects, and Chief Architects - Decomposed a monolithic PHP application into services - Migrated infrastructure to AWS and automated deployments with Chef - Built testing environments for engineers and architects - Automated app releases to App Store and Google Play Tech Stack: Chef, AWS, PHP, Objective-C, iOS, Java, Android, Ruby, Bash, CentOS, Jenkins Client: Acquia - Placed at Acquia as an external engineering resource via ESW Capital's talent pool - Implemented end-to-end encryption (E2EE) - Prepared technical deep-dive reports for the SEM and VP Tech Stack: Linux, PHP, MySQL, OpenSSL, AWS Portfolio Company: Lyris - Converted a legacy Macromedia Flash UI to AngularJS - Created shared AngularJS components adopted across 67 ESW portfolio companies, serving millions of users - Dockerized microservices - Automated multi-browser test environment Tech Stack: Java, Apache Tomcat, JavaScript, NodeJS, AngularJS, PHP, Docker, K8s
Sr. Backend Developer
Hamburg/DE
Sep 2014 - Mar 2015
Goodgame Studios was one of Europe's largest browser game developers with tens of millions of players across its portfolio. - Contributed to the company-wide payment shop, handling in-game purchases across all titles - Integrated payment gateways to expand the shop's supported payment methods - Refactored legacy codebase to improve maintainability and reduce technical debt - Created unit and integration tests with PHPUnit and Codeception Tech Stack: PHP, ZF2, PHPUnit, Codeception, JavaScript, Couchbase, MySQL, SQLite, Linux
Full Stack Software Engineer
Dubai/UAE
Sep 2013 - Aug 2014
PropertyFinder was one of the largest real estate portals in the Middle East. - Core engineer on MyCRM, a CRM product built for property agencies - Automated build and test pipeline across Staging, QA, and Build on AWS - Developed REST API consumed by mobile app and web client - Designed property search using spatial data types - Built the client-side UI with Backbone.js Tech Stack: Linux, ZF2, MySQL, Jenkins, JS, Backbone, RequireJS, NodeJS, AWS
Sr. Frontend Developer
Dubai/UAE
Oct 2012 - Sep 2013
Sole frontend developer at a professional networking startup positioning itself as the LinkedIn of the MENA region. - Built the full client-side application using Google Closure - Wrote unit and functional tests with Selenium - Automated building and deployment with Bash scripts Tech Stack: JavaScript, Google Closure, Symfony Framework, MySQL, Git
Sr. Software Developer
Istanbul/Turkey, Dubai/UAE
Nov 2011 - Aug 2012
Rocket Internet was a Berlin-based startup factory building and scaling e-commerce ventures across global markets. - Contributed to the Rocket E-Commerce framework, powering 5 high-load platforms across multiple markets - Built and maintained backoffice and admin UIs alongside backend services - Optimized MySQL and Memcached to sustain performance under high traffic - Conducted technical interviews on behalf of the CTO for rapid team scaling Tech Stack: PHP, Zend Framework, Yii Framework, MySQL, Memcached, JavaScript, jQuery, ExtJS, Git
Sr. Software Developer
Istanbul/Turkey
Oct 2010 - Oct 2011
Triodor was a Netherlands-based software agency delivering web and gaming products for European clients. - Contributed to backend development across two projects, including a browser-based flash game - Built services on Zend Framework backed by MySQL and MongoDB - Mentored junior engineers, conducted code reviews, and unblocked team members - Automated deployment pipelines with Jenkins CI Tech Stack: PHP5, Zend Framework, MySQL, MongoDB, Jenkins CI, SVN, Git, Shell Script
Software Developer
Istanbul/Turkey
Sep 2009 - Sep 2010
Sahibinden was one of Turkey's largest classified ad platforms. - Implemented HTML/CSS, JavaScript, and AJAX across PHP templates as part of the frontend team - Built Sahibinden's proprietary IE browser toolbar for in-browser search and listings access - Integrated early social features: Twitter share and Facebook Like buttons - Ensured cross-browser compatibility across IE6, IE7/IE8, and Firefox Tech Stack: JavaScript, jQuery, AJAX, PHP, HTML, CSS
Founder
Ankara/Turkey
Jan 2005 - Aug 2009
- Founded and ran an independent web development business serving 20+ local clients, including medical clients (Gürgan Clinic, Madalyon Clinic) - Delivered full-service: requirements, design, development, and ongoing maintenance - Sold domains and hosting; managed Debian/Gentoo Linux infrastructure including firewalls and email - Managed Google Ads campaigns and acted as webmaster for multiple clients Tech Stack: PHP, MySQL, Linux, Bash, JS, HTML, CSS
IT Administrator
Ankara/Turkey
Jan 2001 - Jan 2005
Vilayet was a Turkish geographic data and mapping company. - Responsible for data architecture of mapping systems - Implemented reverse geocoding using PHP and Haversine formula queries against MySQL - Managed Apache and MySQL servers Tech Stack: PHP, MySQL, Linux, Bash, JS, HTML, CSS
Ventures
Founder & CTO
Delaware/US (Remote)
Sep 2025 - Present
Building an agent-first platform for autonomous PE deal origination and specialist engineering services for post-acquisition tech modernization and enterprise SaaS transformation. Both service lines draw on personal experience overseeing $1B+ in acquired company value.
Education
Economics (coursework)
at
Anadolu University
Attended without completing the degree
Associate of Science (AS) Information Management
at
Sakarya University
Jun 2009
Graduated
Expertise
Architecture & StrategySoftware Architecture, Distributed Systems, Serverless, Microservices, Design Patterns, Site-Reliability Engineering, Software Development Processes, Cloud Computing
AI & AgentsLLMs, AI Agents, LangChain, LangGraph, MCP, RAG, Tokenization, Prompt Engineering, Vector Databases, Embeddings, OpenAI API, Anthropic API
Cloud & DevOpsAWS, AWS Amplify, GCP, Docker, Kubernetes, Jenkins, Nexus, Chef, Linux, CentOS, Bash, Git, SVN, Continuous Delivery, DevOps
LanguagesJavaScript, TypeScript, GoLang, PHP, Java, C, C++, Objective-C, HTML, CSS
Frontend & Backend FrameworksNodeJS, ExpressJS, React, NextJS, AngularJS, Backbone, jQuery, Material UI, Google Closure, Zend Framework, Yii Framework, Symfony Framework, Apache Tomcat, RequireJS
DatabasesPostgreSQL, MySQL, MongoDB, BigQuery, Redis, RDS, Couchbase, SQLite, Memcached
APIs & IntegrationsGraphQL, REST API, WebSockets, Webhooks, OAuth 2.0
TestingUnit Testing, Functional Testing, PHPUnit, Codeception, Cucumber, Gherkin, Jest
MobileiOS, Android
MethodologiesAgile, Scrum, Kanban, Lean Startup
Q/A
Are you available for full-time roles?
Yes, full-time. Euclon is an early-stage independent venture that does not conflict with a full-time commitment. I am actively seeking VP of Engineering, CTO, or equivalent full-time opportunities and can commit fully to the right role from day one.
Contributions to any projects, sites, portfolios, blogs, etc?
I contributed to Firefox, Linux, and PHP local communities in Turkey. Presented on RabbitMQ and JavaScript performance at local meetups. See my GitHub profile for code contributions. I've developed open-source tools for developers, including a developer prompt utility, a task runner called boss, a star rating plugin, a slider plugin and others.
Certificates and continuing education?
  • MongoDB Developer Certificate, 2013
  • DeepLearning.AI — Machine Learning Specialization
  • DeepLearning.AI — Neural Networks and Machine Learning (2017, ongoing)
  • DeepLearning.AI — AI Agents series: Long-Term Agentic Memory with LangGraph, AI Agents in LangGraph, Building AI Browser Agents, Building AI Voice Agents for Production, Vector Databases: from Embeddings to Applications
  • Stanford — Engineering Leadership Program
  • Stanford Online — Neural Networks, Machine Learning, Deep Learning, Reinforcement Learning, NLP, NLU (2019–2020)
  • MIT OpenCourseWare — Cryptocurrency Engineering (2019); Nuts and Bolts of New Ventures (2025)
Would you like to work on-site?
My first preference is always remote, however I am open to offers from the right company.