Umut Karakulak

Umut Karakulak

Web Development & Machine Learning

Someone who is passionate about experimenting with innovative, state of the art technologies. Currently working as a full-stack developer & tech lead with a touch of machine learning for good measure.

About Me

Languages

100%
Turkish (Native)
90%
English (Professional)
80%
Japanese (Conversational)

Skills

Javascript
Typescript
Node.js
NestJS
Next.js
React
tRPC
HTML / CSS
Tailwind CSS
SQL
MongoDB
Python
FastAPI
NumPy
Pandas
Tensorflow
RAG
LLMs
NLP
Computer Vision
Machine Learning
AR / VR
Infrastructure
System Design
DevOps
Mentorship
Management
Technical Recruitment

Tools & Services

Git
Linux
Docker
Azure
AWS
Vercel
NewRelic
Sentry
WorkOS
Twilio
GTM
Notion
Jira
PagerDuty
Claude Code
Devin

Work History

  • Wevnal Co.,Ltd

    Wevnal Co.,Ltd

    Tokyo, Japan
    Engineering Manager (BOTCHAN AI Team)

    Directly managed 10+ engineers in a flat organization, supporting growth through regular 1-on-1s, mentorship, and feedback. Recruited, interviewed and evaluated engineers, established team rules and practices, and collaborated closely with business stakeholders while promoting AI-driven development.

    Tech Lead (Botchan AICALL)

    Technical lead for Botchan AICALL, a call-based AI agent built using the OpenAI Realtime API. Active development from 0->1 phase, including system design, hands-on implementation, and code reviews. Established coding standards, development environments, and DevOps practices, while overseeing security, reliability, and observability.

    Tech Lead (Botchan AI)

    Technical lead for Botchan AI, a RAG-based chatbot. Owned system architecture and infrastructure, reduced technical debt, and led hands-on development, requirement definition, and code reviews. Acted as the primary technical contact for business teams and customers, overseeing security, incident response, reliability, and observability.

    development, prototyping, system architecture, infrastructure, devops, testing, QA, security, code reviews, incident response, reliability, monitoring, customer support, hiring, mentorship, 1on1s, cross-team coordination, business support


  • Dunksoft Co.,Ltd

    Dunksoft Co.,Ltd

    Tokyo, Japan
    Full Stack Engineer

    Development lead and management of WeARee! a community creation platform for everyone. Association from ideation to 0→1 product creation, with hands-on development, product decisions, and direct customer communication.

    Data Scientist

    Research, data analysis, preparation and realization of in-house machine learning models and API's on a variety of problem domains.

    development, design, prototyping, system architecture, infrastructure, requirement definition, business strategy, customer relations, mentorship


  • obase

    obase

    Istanbul, Turkey
    Software Engineering Intern

    Played an active role on development of an ERP project for a large e-commerce company.

    development


  • Dunksoft Co.,Ltd

    Dunksoft Co.,Ltd

    Tokyo, Japan
    Software Engineering Intern

    Development of an innovative video conferencing tool using Microsoft Kinect for pose estimation and speech analysis.

    development, design


  • Freelance

    Istanbul, Turkey
    Software Developer

    Intermittently worked as a freelancer for a wide variety of companies including Microsoft Turkey. Developing mostly windows applications using .NET framework.

    requirement definition, development, design, business relations

Education

Yeditepe University

Yeditepe University

Bachelor's degree, Computer Science Engineering

Projects

Botchan AICALL

Botchan AICALL

Tech Lead

A voice-to-voice AI phone agent built usings realtime API, enabling natural, low-latency conversations. It automates inbound calls such as inquiries, changes, and cancellations, helping reduce costs and improve response rates. The product supports custom scenario design, third-party integrations, reporting, and enterprise-grade security.

Botchan AI

Botchan AI

Tech Lead

A secure, scalable and reliable RAG-based AI chat system that delivers accurate, low-hallucination responses grounded in company data. It automates online customer support 24/7, improving response speed and reducing support costs through reliable, natural AI conversations. The product supports custom scenarios, reference data processing, reporting, and more.

WeARee!

WeARee!

Tech Lead & Project Management

A SaaS platform where users can create interactive spaces, without any coding knowledge. WeARee! aims to provide fun and innovative tools for building communities, accessible to anyone from anywhere. These tools include AR events, web page creation, virtual tours, 3D models, stamp rallies, and much more.

Cryptocurrency Tax Calculator

Cryptocurrency Tax Calculator

Personal Project

Most famous tax calculators either did not have proper support for the platforms I've used or was not supporting Japanese tax formula. Domestic tools were too expensive to justify, with these excuses created my own tax calculator to practice my web dev.

Buddy-19

Buddy-19

Personal Project

A web app that has been created during initial months of COVID-19 lockdown. A platform where multiple people can watch videos, play games and even create custom flows together using web sockets. Meant as a complimentary app for online meetings, thus the name buddy-19.

Computer Vision API

Computer Vision API

Development

Developed a variety of machine learning APIs and models for internal use, specifically focusing on transparent image processing and analysis. With all the black-box steps of the deep neural networks are exposed in a human readable way as much as possible, ensuring clarity in the process.

Natural Language Understanding API

Natural Language Understanding API

Development

Developed a variety of machine learning APIs and models for natural language understanding, with a focus on the Japanese language for internal company use. This includes keyword extraction, summarization, similarity index, emotion analysis, and many more.

Artificial Musical Compositions Using Deep Belief Nets and Genetic Algorithms

Artificial Musical Compositions Using Deep Belief Nets and Genetic Algorithms

Author

As a graduation project, I've designed an innovative method for composing music using a hybrid structure. The fitness function of a genetic algorithm is constructed from a k-means filter of an unsupervised neural network output. This structure allows for the emulation of human behaviors without introducing any bias.

Awards

Tokyo Public Transportation Open Data Challenge INIAD special innovation award

Tokyo Public Transportation Open Data Challenge INIAD special innovation award

Issued by Tokyo ODPT, INIAD · Dec 2019

Sounds of Transport aims to showcase the intricate harmony behind Tokyo's complex railway system by utilizing train schedules provided by ODPT and customizable map triggers to generate music.

Imagine Cup 2009 World Finalist

Imagine Cup 2009 World Finalist

Issued by Microsoft · Jul 2009

Co-developer of CogoStuff, winner of Imagine Cup Turkey 2009 in software development branch, world finalist.

You can find me here!