Akin Gundogdu
Akin Gundogdu - Senior Full Stack Software Engineer

Senior Full Stack Software Engineer

Akin Gundogdu

With 10+ years of experience, I'm a Software Engineer who loves building scalable, high-performance systems and driving innovation through modern technologies. I have designed and built systems that reliably handle billions of requests. I specialize in backend heavy fullstack development, building scalable APIs and services while delivering high-quality web applications. I have the capability to produce quality, production-ready applications by correctly using and properly orchestrating AI tools. I enjoy collaborating across teams and taking ownership of complex projects that push boundaries.

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Tech stack

Experience

  • Founding Engineer & CTO

    Dec 2025 - Present

    MU Musicpal 5 months · San Francisco, CA, USA · Remote
    • Founding vision & product strategy: Laying the groundwork for a transformative initiative in the music industry—starting with PianoPal, an AI-powered platform that enables children and adults to learn piano through real-time conversational coaching, making deep musical mastery accessible to anyone regardless of access to in-person instruction.
    • AI coaching & real-time interaction: Architecting and building the core AI tutor experience—live, real-time conversational sessions where students interact with an AI coach that guides them through technique, theory, and musical nuance, replicating the depth and responsiveness of a private instructor.
    • Teacher dashboard & student analytics: Designed and shipped a comprehensive analytics dashboard for teachers—enabling them to manage the full lifecycle of student progress, create custom arrangements, assign personalized lessons and homework, and track performance across every dimension of practice.
    • AI-powered practice analysis & scoring: Built an intelligent practice review system that lets teachers replay student sessions, while AI analyzes errors, identifies weak areas, and produces detailed scoring and diagnostic reports—surfacing targeted suggestions so teachers can focus instruction on exactly where each student needs improvement.
    • Native piano apps & full-stack architecture: Developing the piano learning application natively in Swift and Android for optimal instrument interaction fidelity, with a Next.js, shadcn/ui, Tailwind CSS, and TanStack-powered web dashboard for teachers, backed by a Nest.js and PostgreSQL API layer on AWS infrastructure.

  • Senior Full Stack Software Engineer

    Mar 2023 - Jan 2026

    Kajabi 2 years 11 months · Irvine, California, USA · Remote
    • Infrastructure & cloud efficiency: Owned the community product’s PostgreSQL layer on AWS RDS Aurora—database maintenance, scaling, sharding and partitioning, and performance monitoring—alongside Reserved Instance planning and broader efficiency work so data infrastructure stays reliable and cloud spend stays disciplined as usage grows.
    • Branded Mobile Apps (BMA) release automation: Built a fully automated build-and-publish stack with GitHub Actions, Fastlane, Ruby on Rails, and Python so customers release native iOS and Android apps through their own Apple App Store and Google Play accounts without manual release work—the pipeline produces builds, applies screenshots, store copy, and required listing settings, submits for review, and carries approved releases through to production—making it practical to publish thousands of branded apps in minutes instead of operator-heavy release cycles.
    • Payments & subscriptions for BMA: Shipped native Apple and Google billing so creators can sell both one-time add-on purchases and recurring subscriptions to their own end users inside branded apps—giving our customers a way to monetize their audiences on mobile, not just on the web.
    • Creator-facing tooling: Designed and shipped App Builder Studio with React and TypeScript so customers can visually design their own branded mobile apps and publish them to the Apple App Store and Google Play without writing code—keeping routine mobile storefront work out of engineering queues while supporting engagement and commerce goals.
    • Community product: Partnered with the Community team to ship major features on our community experience—a product used by millions—using Node.js, AWS Lambda, React, shadcn/ui, and Tailwind CSS, with an active end-to-end role across services and UI.
    • Backend operations & production scale: Took ownership of backend operations and production concerns for systems used by millions—scaling, load balancing, capacity and health monitoring, and day-to-day reliability—so services stay stable and responsive as traffic and demand grow.

  • Founding Engineer & CTO

    Aug 2025 - Present

    MO Movve 9 months · Turkey · Remote
    • Health & wearable platform: Building Movve as a direct competitor to Whoop—a health-tracking platform paired with the Movve Band that collects and analyzes detailed biometric data including sleep quality, heart rate, stress levels, and body temperature, making premium health insights accessible at a fraction of the cost.
    • AI health coaching & analytics: Architecting an AI coach that synthesizes raw biometric streams into actionable, statistically grounded insights—motivating users to move more, sleep better, and manage stress through personalized recommendations backed by their own data trends.
    • Mobile & cross-platform delivery: Developing the consumer-facing mobile experience in React Native for iOS and Android, with a Next.js, shadcn/ui, Tailwind CSS, and TanStack-powered web dashboard, all backed by a Nest.js and PostgreSQL API layer running on AWS.

  • Founding Engineer & CTO

    Jan 2023 - Present

    DI DigitalWisers 3 years 4 months · Turkey · Remote
    • Community platform: Built DigitalWisers as a community-driven platform competing in the Circle space—enabling creators and organizations to launch their own communities, manage audiences, and cultivate engaged member pools within a single, purpose-built product.
    • Talent marketplace & hiring pipeline: Designed and shipped an integrated hiring system that connects job-seeking candidates with engineering-hungry companies inside the same community ecosystem—managing the full recruitment lifecycle from discovery through placement so hiring happens where professional relationships already live.
    • End-to-end ownership: Owned the technical vision and architecture from inception—combining community management, audience engagement, and hiring workflows into a cohesive platform that serves both community operators and the talent marketplace simultaneously.

  • Lead Full Stack Software Engineer & Engineering Manager

    Dec 2020 - Mar 2023

    Superpeer, Inc. 2 years 4 months · San Francisco, USA · Remote
    • Product delivery: Analyzed competitors and the product landscape, then shipped major pillars—course management, one-to-one meeting infrastructure, and announcements—so the team could move the roadmap forward quickly and support commercial traction.
    • Architecture & enablement: Designed and implemented a new full-stack architecture, trained engineers on the stack, and tightened how we built and operated services—raising delivery quality while keeping production costs under control.
    • Engineering leadership: Led a focused engineering group to deliver investment-critical web, backend, and mobile work end-to-end, aligning execution with company priorities through a high-stakes growth and fundraising period.
    • Systems, quality & growth: Owned system management and scaling concerns, strengthened code review norms and overall code quality, validated critical business logic before release, and acted as a hands-on mentor—pairing and coaching so engineers could grow their technical judgment and ownership.
    • Edge caching & social previews: Built and ran an advanced caching setup on Cloudflare Workers so creator profile pages stay extremely fast at the edge, and shipped dynamic Open Graph meta so link previews stay accurate and compelling when profiles are shared.
    • Atomic CSS & design system: Played an active role in introducing atomic CSS and a structured system-design approach for the UI—defining patterns so interfaces aligned across the application—and split effort between implementation and cross-team alignment so user experience felt consistent and spoke one language everywhere.

  • Founding Engineer & CTO

    Feb 2021 - Aug 2024

    SM Smarthronline 3 years 7 months · Turkey · Remote
    • Logistics HR platform: Built SmartHROnline as a purpose-built hiring and human resources platform for the logistics sector—where recruitment complexity is exceptionally high—digitizing the entire hiring lifecycle so companies can manage candidate pipelines, interviews, and onboarding online instead of through fragmented manual processes.
    • Referral-driven recruitment: Designed and shipped a referral-based staffing engine that sources and surfaces candidates to logistics companies through trusted professional networks—reducing time-to-hire and improving placement quality in an industry where reliability and speed are critical.
    • Communication & process management: Built integrated messaging and interview scheduling workflows between companies and candidates—centralizing correspondence, interview coordination, and hiring decisions in one platform so nothing falls through the cracks during fast-moving logistics recruitment cycles.
    • Full-stack architecture & delivery: Owned the end-to-end technical stack—Next.js with shadcn/ui, Tailwind CSS, and TanStack on the frontend, Nest.js and PostgreSQL on the backend, all running on AWS—shipping a production-grade platform from zero to serving active logistics companies.

  • Founding Engineer & Lead Full Stack Software Engineer

    Jan 2020 - Dec 2020

    Epigra 1 year · London, UK · Remote
    • Architecture modernization: Drove a portfolio-wide shift toward domain-driven design—restructuring legacy client systems around clear bounded contexts and shared patterns so multiple products could scale and stay maintainable under ongoing delivery pressure.
    • ULive product: Owned the ULive product end to end from early concept through launch, building it with a small focused team and helping the company present a credible, investor-ready story around a flagship SaaS offering.
    • ULive — build, mobile & ownership: Ran the ULive initiative across the full product lifecycle—priorities, sequencing, and release—coding core flows while standing up frontend and backend architecture from scratch, partnering with the mobile team to unblock delivery and keep milestones aligned, and steering both technical execution and coordination until ship as the accountable owner for the product.
    • Technical leadership: Stayed close to architecture and implementation decisions across engagements—unblocking teams, aligning backend and frontend direction, and keeping delivery practices coherent when several client projects ran in parallel.
    • Quality, reviews & people: Deepened pull-request review culture, helped define coding standards that reduced recurring defects, and contributed to hiring and mentoring so engineers leveled up on system design and day-to-day craft.

  • Senior Full Stack Software Engineer & CTO

    Aug 2016 - Oct 2019

    My Next Match 3 years 3 months · London, UK · On-site
    • Multi-platform product delivery: Owned substantial work across backend services, the primary React web application, and Swift-based mobile clients—aligning APIs, data contracts, and UX so athletes, clubs, and internal operators interacted with one coherent platform no matter which surface they used.
    • Microservices at scale: Designed and iterated on a large-scale, production-hardened microservice topology—hundreds of independently deployable services—so domain teams could ship in parallel while keeping fault isolation, rollout safety, and capacity growth aligned as traffic and feature surface area expanded.
    • Delivery & platform operations: Participated in roadmap and sprint planning, reviewed high-impact pull requests, and helped operate CI/CD and release practices—keeping deploys frequent and predictable and production steady in a fast-moving, always-on environment.
    • Production engineering & data plane: Took ownership of building, maintaining, and operating critical production infrastructure—scaling and sharding strategies as traffic grew—and standardized asynchronous communication on Apache Kafka so services could exchange events reliably, keeping the distributed system coherent and resilient under load.

  • Full Stack Software Engineer

    Mar 2014 - Jun 2016

    Siskon (JTI) 2 years 4 months · Turkey · On-site
    • Internal systems portfolio: Built and evolved a set of internal web applications for plant operations, commercial sales, and management reporting—partnering with stakeholders from discovery and requirements through iterative delivery, hardening, and long-term production support so teams could trust the numbers and workflows they ran every day.
    • Architecture & data modeling: Owned relational schema design, integration seams, and backend structure across both service-oriented and monolithic deployments—choosing boundaries that fit legacy constraints while keeping reporting accurate, migrations safe, and downstream consumers consistent.
    • End-to-end engineering: Shipped features across server-rendered and richer client-side experiences in a TypeScript-heavy stack that bridged Ruby on Rails, Express, Nest.js, and .NET services; reviewed code for correctness and operational risk; and helped keep releases and deployments boringly reliable for on-site, always-on internal users.

  • Software Engineer

    Feb 2012 - Mar 2014

    Narkonteks Tekstil A.Ş. (Blackspade) 2 years 2 months · Turkey · On-site
    • Finance & stock systems migration: Helped move core accounting and inventory processes off SAP into bespoke internal applications—replacing rigid vendor workflows with software shaped around how the textile business actually buys, makes, and ships goods.
    • Accounting & inventory domain depth: Built a practical understanding of invoicing, payments, stock movements, and costing—translating shop-floor and finance rules into reliable system behavior instead of generic templates.
    • Internal tools for operations: Delivered and maintained reporting and operational tools finance and plant teams used daily, tightening visibility into production, stock positions, and cost drivers when decisions had to be fast.
    • In-house UI framework & SPA platform: Contributed significantly to a company-wide JavaScript single-page-application stack and an internal web UI component framework—helping standardize new screens on that platform and supporting fellow engineers with integration guidance, troubleshooting, and hands-on technical help as teams adopted it.

Blog

Latest articles and technical writing.

Frontend State Management Compared: Redux Toolkit vs Zustand vs Jotai vs XState

A hands-on comparison of four React state management libraries through the same feature — a multi-step checkout flow — with bundle size analysis, re-render profiling, and a decision framework.

Background Job Architecture in Rails: Sidekiq, GoodJob, and Job Orchestration Patterns

A comprehensive guide to designing robust background job systems in Rails, featuring Sidekiq internals, GoodJob's PostgreSQL-based approach, and advanced job orchestration patterns.

Micro-Frontend Architecture: Runtime Composition with Module Federation

How I've used Webpack Module Federation to split monolithic frontends into independently deployable apps — what worked, what didn't, and the sharp edges you'll hit.

Embracing AI: Adapt, Evolve, and Stay Ahead

How Can We Integrate AI into Our Daily Lives and Work? In recent years, AI has become a big part of our lives. It is used in many areas, from apps that make daily tasks easier to tools that help with software development.

Embracing AI: Adapt, Evolve, and Stay Ahead

Switching from JetBrains to Cursor IDE: My Journey and 4 Essential Extensions

After almost ten years on JetBrains IDEs, I moved to Cursor—built on VS Code—and share the extensions that made Ruby, Rails, Git, and databases feel productive again.

Switching from JetBrains to Cursor IDE: My Journey and 4 Essential Extensions

Frontend Performance at Scale: Bundle Size, Code Splitting, and Runtime Optimization

A systematic guide to optimizing frontend performance in large-scale applications, focusing on bundle analysis, code splitting, and runtime enhancements.

Event-Driven Architecture: Async Communication with Kafka, RabbitMQ, and NATS

A practical comparison of Kafka, RabbitMQ, and NATS for microservice communication — covering delivery guarantees, partitioning, dead letters, and when to pick which based on real production experience.

Understanding CAP Theorem and Quorum in Distributed Systems

If you are passionate about backend architecture and enjoy working with distributed systems, mastering the CAP theorem and quorum is essential. I've encountered numerous questions regarding this topic during some interviews, and I want to provide details in case anyone is interested in learning more

Understanding CAP Theorem and Quorum in Distributed Systems

State Management in a Drag-and-Drop Builder: Tree Structures, Selection, and Multi-Level Nesting

Explore the state management challenges in drag-and-drop interfaces, focusing on tree structures, selection models, and performance optimization for complex layouts.

Building a Design System: Component Library, Token System, and Versioning Strategy

How we built a design system for 4 product teams — the token architecture that actually scaled, the component API decisions we got wrong, and why our first versioning strategy nearly killed adoption.

Complex State Management: Undo/Redo, Collaboration, and Real-Time Sync in an App Builder Studio

What I learned building undo/redo, real-time collaboration, and state synchronization into a studio-style app — the patterns that worked, the ones that didn't, and the stuff nobody warns you about.

CQRS and Event Sourcing in NestJS: Production-Grade Architecture with @nestjs/cqrs

A hands-on guide to implementing CQRS and Event Sourcing in NestJS using the @nestjs/cqrs package, with real-world patterns for commands, queries, events, sagas, and event stores.

DDD Strategic Design: Bounded Context, Context Map, and Ubiquitous Language in Practice

How we decomposed a growing e-commerce monolith into bounded contexts using EventStorming, context mapping patterns, and ubiquitous language — with real examples of what worked and what didn't.

Saga Pattern in Microservices: Orchestration vs Choreography with Real-World Scenarios

A practical guide to implementing the Saga pattern for distributed transactions — comparing orchestration and choreography with TypeScript examples, compensating transactions, and lessons from production systems.

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