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 & engineering manager with a touch of AI for good measure.

About Me

Languages

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

Web & Backend

TypeScript
JavaScript
Python
Go
Node.js
React
Next.js
NestJS
FastAPI
tRPC
gRPC
Tailwind CSS
SQL
MongoDB
Redis

AI & ML

RAG
LLM Ops
Machine Learning
NLP
Computer Vision
TensorFlow
Keras
NumPy
Pandas
AR / VR

Cloud & Tooling

AWS / GCP / Azure
Docker
CI/CD
New Relic
Sentry
WorkOS / Auth0
ClickHouse

Architecture & Lead

System Design
Microservices
Realtime Systems
DevOps
Automated Testing
AI-Native SDLC
Management
Technical Recruitment

Work History

  • Wevnal Co.,Ltd

    Wevnal Co.,Ltd

    Tokyo, Japan
    Engineering Manager

    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. Awarded the company-wide VS (Valuable Sugee) Award in Sep 2025 for cross-project contributions and versatility.

    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. Involved 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 APIs 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 in the 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 using the OpenAI 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! Builder

WeARee! Builder

Lead Developer

A lightweight, modular WYSIWYG web-builder library built with TypeScript, SCSS, and Rollup, designed to be extensible and self-documenting. Features a custom TipTap rich-text editor, image editing, 3D model and 360° panorama blocks, monetization using Stripe, client/server HTML parsers, and declarative HTML for design templates.

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.

Birdwatcher

Birdwatcher

Personal Project

An event-driven web crawler and bird recognition pipeline built as a polyglot monorepo with Go, Python, and Vue 3. It scrapes URLs to detect bird species across text and images using gRPC and Protobuf, organizing sightings into an interactive species catalog.

Oto-Navi

Oto-Navi

Side Project

A multilingual audio-guide platform built end-to-end in 2024 for cultural spots and facilities. Developed the full stack using Next.js, TypeScript, Supabase, and AWS (Amplify, S3 & CloudFront), featuring interactive waveform playback, user onboarding and rich-text guide authoring.

Computer Vision API

Computer Vision API

Development

Developed a variety of machine learning APIs and models for internal use, specifically focusing on explainable image processing and analysis. All 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!