Isa Mert Gurbuz
Staff Software Engineer with 7+ years of experience building and scaling high-impact systems across adtech, healthcare, and enterprise platforms.
Passionate about functional programming, free software, and crafting elegant tooling that amplifies developer productivity.
Equally at home deep in system architecture as mentoring teams and shaping engineering culture.
Experience
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Ran workshops and presentations on AI adoption and practical usage across engineering teams.
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Closely paired with and mentored engineers across Ads teams.
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Designed and led L/XL scale projects spanning all Ads teams end-to-end.
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Formed cross-organizational workgroups (e.g. fraud prevention), actively contributing to their design and supporting other teams throughout.
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Participated in the staff eng community, shaped organizational decisions and pushed back on misdirections in architectural and process discussions.
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Overhauled pipeline structures across all Ads teams — defined a unified architecture, contributing guidelines, and improved both performance and maintainability.
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Built an internal deployment utility in Deno/TypeScript that unified alerts, dashboards and deployments. Still actively used across all Ads teams and parts of the wider organization.
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Reshaped how teams handle documentation using open-source tools (HackMD) and a custom wrapper, enabling real-time collaborative docs. Adopted across Ads teams and beyond.
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Designed and built multiple BigQuery-backed data systems for ads reporting and analytics, owning the architecture end-to-end from ingestion pipelines to query optimization.
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Built an end-to-end testing framework leveraging the BigQuery emulator, enabling fast, reliable local testing of data pipelines — significantly streamlining the development workflow around BigQuery-dependent processes.
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Transitioned the entire ads consumption subsystem from scheduled jobs (~30 min latency) to near-real-time Kafka Streams, reducing overspend from 10–15% to sub 1%.
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Designed and delivered multiple projects end-to-end using React.js, node.js (NestJS), Kotlin/Java (Quarkus/Spring) and databases including Couchbase, PostgreSQL and Cassandra. Services deployed and operated on Kubernetes with Docker.
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Worked as a fullstack developer on a healthcare project in a multicultural, multi-timezone environment.
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Built and maintained node.js microservices on AWS, using Lambda, DynamoDB and Cognito.
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Contributed to a Haskell monolith backend and several React.js frontend projects.
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Developed internal tools in Haskell and TypeScript for automating and validating internal workflows, resulting in at least ~70% productivity improvement on targeted tasks.
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Developed a Java-based CMS backend consisting of several microservices, used by maintainers to manage applications on the AppGallery market. Designed new endpoints, performed refactoring, and was responsible for building and maintaining the DevOps pipeline.
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Worked on adapting Huawei Mobile Services to third-party frameworks — led a newly formed team of ~10 Cordova developers, built cross-framework libraries alongside the React Native team, and automated internal workflows using Bash.